Your Hard Drives Are Dying, And There’s Not Much You Can Do About It

There was a time when the music industry rushed to replace magnetic tape with a digitized version of the media stored on hard drives. It sounded like a good idea at the time, since a hard drive took up way less space than their tape-based counterparts, but 30+ years down the road we’re finding that there’s a finite life span to those drives, and it turns out it’s not as long lasting as tape.

The archival storage company Iron Mountain states that about a fifth of all drives it gets are unreadable. It turns out that hard drives are subject to their own type of entropy from things like:

• Drives refusing to spin up due to stuck bearings

• Loss of magnetic charge

• Failure of the read electronics on the drive

• Interface formats for the drive not available

• Software to read the files is outdated and unusable on current computer operating systems

Here we were thinking that because these things were electronic, they were going to live forever, but we’re barely getting 30 years out of them.

While magnetic tape is thought to last for about 50 years, it has its own range of problems. Loss of magnetic charge, binding problems due to heat and storage, and chemical problems causing the oxide to shed are issues commonly faced by archival engineers.

But if you think that more modern tech is immune, how about this:

• CDs exhibit “rot” due to chemical deterioration. An erasable CD-R has a predicted longevity of 20 to 50 years

• SSDs can deteriorate from being written too many times. In other words, they wear out. Their expected lifespan is only 10 years

• Even LTO (which is a tape format), which was designed primarily for data archival work, loses its capabilities over multiple generations

30 years might sound like a long time, but it can go by like a flash when you’re not thinking about your data. Unless you continually back up to whatever new format is available, you might be out of luck just when you need your archival data the most.

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