Data Rot — 20% of Hard Drives Used for Long-Term Music Storage are Dying
Photo Credit: William Warby
Do you have old music stored on an ancient hard drive somewhere in your orbit? You might want to check the drive and consider a different storage medium—a new report suggests around 20% of drives from the 90s are now bricks.A new report from Iron Mountain, an enterprise information management company, reveals why multiple storage mediums are needed for sensitive data. “It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,” says Robert Koszela, the Global Director for Strategic Initiatives & Growth for Iron Mountain. “Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”
In the early 2000s, the migration away from physical tape storage began, with hard drives picking up the slack. As studios began remastering and transferring their data, they discovered the tape was deteriorating. But just like tape, hard drives also deteriorate with most commercial drives only rated for three to five years. Even stored in perfect conditions for archival purposes, these drives will eventually die.
“Unfortunately, the only time that a studio will open its archives is if it needs to look for original masters for commercial use. If it has waited too long, then it might be too late to recover the drive that it needs, resulting in the loss of all information contained within,” Tom’s Hardware reports.So what’s the solution here? Hard drives were thought to be a more ‘permanent’ form of archival compared to fragile plastic film with a magnetic coating. Microsoft is taking steps to address new archival formats for digital data in its Project Silica—a plan to store multiple layers of data inside slabs of quartz glass.
The aim of Project Silica is to develop a cloud-scale archive media system for reading and writing data from etched glass slabs. The encoding technology is the production of areas with polarization-based patterns at points within a square glass slab, defined by 3D coordinates. The polarization pattern points are called voxels and are produced using femtosecond laser pulses. Voxels are written side by side in 2D layers across the glass platter’s XY plane.
“The unique properties of the glass media and the clean slate, cloud-first co-design of the hardware and software allow Silica to be fundamentally more sustainable and achieve significantly lower costs for archival data than magnetic tape,” Microsoft says.
Until glass platter backups are more widely available—you should be replacing your music hard drives every three to five years to avoid being left with a brick. Let’s just hope the archives for most major record labels are doing the same. There’s nothing worse than losing masters to a preventable mistake.
