Hard Drives From the 1990s Are Failing, Says Data Archival Firm

[peterg23]

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/hard-drives-from-the-1990s-are-failing-says-data-archival-firm

[2Piececombo]

Maybe this is a stupid, uninformed take or I'm misunderstanding what the article is saying... but anyone keeping data on hard drives from the 90s does not have any business being in charge of storing data. Do they not have enough redundancy to prevent data loss? Are they not monitoring drive status and actively replacing drives that are failing? Seems like an entirely preventable issue. Music labels have boatloads of cash and if they arent spending enough of it on data backups or archival then it's their own damn fault. Full disclosure I skimmed the article so maybe I missed something important. But my main takeaway was... people are using 20 year old hard drives and seem surprised that they are failing? 

[Frank1940]

I would imagine that the lubricant used on the spindles has hardened which prevents the spindle motor from being able to spin the platters up.  Exercising the hard drive by periodically spinning up the drive may prevent this from happening.  Any mechanical device that moves will eventually seize up without periodical movement of all its moving parts whether it is a steam engine or a pocket watch.

[Kilrah]

More common in drives of that era is the rubber damper for the head actuator end stop degrading and turning into sticky goo, then the actuator isn't strong enough to free itself from it. Fixed a few drives with that issue. 

 

 

[Frank1940]

@Kilrah, thanks for another failure mode from inactivity.

 

I just now recall an experience with a 10 or 20MB hard drive (that size is correct!!!) back in the early 1990's.  It became so slow in spinning up to speed (hardening of the lubricant) that it would not be ready when the BIOS went looking for it to start loading the OS.  My solution was to do a complete read/write check of every byte of memory (640KB) as a part of the BIOS startup process.  That took long enough that when the BIOS did go looking for the hard drive, it would be ready.  (Replacement of the drive was about $400 back then...)

[Stu1811]

On 9/18/2024 at 7:15 PM, 2Piececombo said:

people are using 20 year old hard drives and seem surprised that they are failing? 

I hate to break it to you, but 20 years ago was 2004. 🤯 I feel old.