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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/music-industrys-1990s-hard-drives-like-all-hdds-are-dying/ [arstechnica.com]

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

Music industry publication Mix [mixonline.com] spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone's data stored on spinning disks.

"In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know," Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. "It may sound like a sales pitch, but it's not; it's a call for action."
[...]
Mix's passing along of Iron Mountain's warning hit Hacker News earlier this week [ycombinator.com], which spurred other tales of faith in the wrong formats. The gist of it: You cannot trust any medium, so you copy important things over and over, into fresh storage. "Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.," writes user abracadaniel [ycombinator.com]. "Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect."

There is discussion of how SSDs are not archival at all; [anandtech.com]
[...]
Knowing that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new. Ars wrote about the five stages of hard drive death [arstechnica.com], including denial, back in 2005.
[...]
Google's server drive data [arstechnica.com] showed in 2007 that HDD failure was mostly unpredictable, and that temperatures were not really the deciding factor.

Original Submission