iSpark
Capturing Memories Making Dreams
Premium
join:2000-07-17
Conway, SC
 ·HTC Inc.
| With cheap Hard Disk Drives
With large HDD's being super cheap now days, could you load all your photo (RAW's and .jpg's) files from a given year, like 2005, and then remove the HDD from the computer and store it?
Will the HDD keep the data until you possibly need it again in some future time?
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James Morton Photography |
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Pretorious
Theres more behind the pic than the wall
Premium,MVM
join:2003-01-08
clubs:  
 ·Verizon Online DSL
| I've had things to last as long as 8 years on a drive laying in a drawer. I'm no an expert by any means but I think the data is stored in positive and negative charges on the disks and they normally will hold those charges for a long time. Theres always a chance of some of it eventually bleeding off over a long period or time which in turn would lose and corrupt the data. |
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cehanis
Premium
join:2002-12-05
Renton, WA
| reply to iSpark
most hard drives, stored in an ideal environment and not powered would/should retain data quite a while (I've heard numbers between 15 and 50 years) I'm sure if you stored in on top of a big sub-woofer, the magnet and the vibration might shorten that quite a bit!
That said, it would seem to be quite a bit longer than optical media. Everyone assumes that CD/DVD's last a long time however those burned at home on a CD/DVD burned do not last anywhere close to as long as commercially produced ones. I've had CD's go bad in as little as 3 years. There are now though some archival discs designed for 100+ years.
I myself store them on hard drives and lock them up. Once a year I pull the drives out and run them for a bit to make sure everything is good and put them away again. |
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Jodokast96
R.I.P Bassman442
Premium
join:2005-11-23
Erial, NJ
·Verizon Online DSL
| reply to iSpark
My last drive to die did so from sitting on a shelf for several months in an HD enclosure. Was working fine for nearly a year, shut down and placed aside, and totally dead when I went to power it up. I'm sure the data is still there on the platters, but accessing it now would be one expensive propostion. |
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overhill
Judd
Premium,MVM
join:2001-02-03
Miami, FL
·RoadRunner Cable
edit:
May 11th, @03:37PM
| reply to iSpark
As long as you keep 1 (minimum) and 2 (recommended) other copies of your data closer at hand, I think this is a good method.
I personally keep 1 copy on internal, 1 on external, and then do what you mentioned above and retire large chunks of (backup-backup-backup) data onto drives...hopefully never to be fired up again. I recently brought up some data on a 10 year old drive without problems, so that felt good.
Right now storage is at a very good price! For ~$100 you can get a 500GB 3.5" or an 250GB external 2.5". I know some photographers who particularly like the external 2.5" drives because they can be powered solely by USB.
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Judd Patterson Photography |
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HFB1217
The Wizard
Premium,ExMod 2000-01
join:2000-06-26
Camelot
clubs:
| reply to iSpark
Aside from Hard Drives for long time storage there are archive grade CD and DVD disks that are supposed to be stable for 50+ years. This might be the better way to go less expensive than a HD and stable for storage.
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****aka The WIZARD **** A Founding member Seti BBR Team Starfire**** |
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pog
Premium
join:2004-06-03
Kihei, HI
·Hawaiian Telcom
| reply to iSpark
Do you mean to delete the data from your system (to make room?) and just keep it on the HD you remove?
If so, I don't know that I'd be comfortable with this for primary storage. Failure could happen at any time and there'd be no way of knowing until you happened to have need for one of those files. Also, the farther into the future you plan for, the more you have to worry about compatibility... eg, in 20 years you may have no way of plugging in your PATA/SATA drive.
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My Site |
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leibold
Premium,MVM
join:2002-07-09
Sunnyvale, CA
clubs:
| reply to iSpark
In the end, entropy will always get you one way or the other.
With a harddisk as storage medium you have essentially three areas of concern:
1.) the actual magnetic storage media
Regardless whether it is spinning or sitting still, expect to loose a few bits over the years. Due to error correction codes this only becomes an issue when you loose too many bits in the same area.
2.) the mechanical moving parts
This is probably the area where you extend harddisk life the most by not running it (reduced wear). However I'm not completely sure if it is really better for the read/write heads to rest on the media or floating on the aircushion created by the rotating disk (the arms are springs pushing the head towards the disk).
3.) the controller and interface electronics
The effect of aging on electronic components is not a simple matter. Some parts (especially electrolytic capacitors) actually age faster (fail sooner) if they are not powered! Other parts (resistors, coils) tend to be very long lasting regardless whether under power or not (unless overloaded). Integrated circuits will probably last longer if the harddisk is stored without power.
Even if your harddisk survives a few decades without information loss and without mechanical or electronic defects, how are you going to access the information ?
If you had put your pictures on a harddisk 3 decades ago (early 80s), that harddisk would probably have an ST-506 interface. Even if you could still find an ST-506 disk controller, it might not help you unless it is the same model that was used to record the information in the first place (this disk interface is 'analog' with the read/write logic on the disk controller). In addition you'll have the challenge of finding a computer with ISA slot and space for a full-height 5.25" disk drive.
If it was only 2 decades ago (late 80s, early 90s), your harddisk would have shrunk in size to a half-height 5/25" drive (size of a CD/DVD drive) and used an ESDI interface. With this interface the read/write logic moved from the controller to the drive, but enough drive control logic remained on the controller to make switching controllers 'interesting' exercises. You'd still have the ISA bus requirement.
Things look slightly better if you are only looking at the last decade, in which case your drive would be a 3.5" IDE drive. However it is rather obvious that IDE (while still available) is an obsolete technology that some new computers no longer support. While you can get PCI-IDE controllers to retrofit an IDE interface in those computers that don't have one, PCI itself is being replaced by PCIe which is mechanically and electrically incompatible.
There are of course some people that point to SCSI in the professional storage world as an example for the longevity of an interface standard. They are of course completely missing the fact that 30 years ago it was anything but clear that SCSI would be the disk interface of the future (from a historic point of view; SCSI itself is getting replaced by SAS right now). Instead the super micros of the day were using SMD, ESMD and later IPI to interface to their disk drives. Even if you had a SCSI disk drive from the early 80s, good luck trying to connect a (high voltage) Differential SCSI-1 drive to a modern Ultra-SCSI (LVD/SE) controller! Besides the electrical incompatibility (which can be handled with a differential to single-ended converter), you are probably not having much fun when the drive refuses to respond to standard mode sense requests (which simply weren't standard back then).
You should be fine putting a harddisk in a drawer as long as you remember to take it out in time to copy the data over to the next generation technology.
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Wolfie00
Premium
join:2005-03-12
| reply to iSpark
Interesting discussion -- I've often thought about this issue myself as I have several externals with important data on them. Obviously having multiple backups of critical data is key.
One thing I've heard is that the IDE logic of hard drives (I don't mean IDE as in PATA, but as in the integrated drive electronics that is common to PATA and SATA) will periodically scan and rewrite sectors as needed in the background. If a sector deteriorates while a drive is inactive for a long time, I suppose theoretically it could become unrecoverable. I've never experienced this though and I have some old computers (I mean, running Windows 3.1  ) that still worked last time I tried them, so my confidence in long-term HDD storage is fairly high.
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"Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace" -- Dr. Albert Schweitzer
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punker
deleted by moderator
Premium
join:2004-06-21
Palmdale, CA
clubs:
 ·Time Warner VOIP
·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to cehanis
said by cehanis  :most hard drives, stored in an ideal environment and not powered would/should retain data quite a while (I've heard numbers between 15 and 50 years) I'm sure if you stored in on top of a big sub-woofer, the magnet and the vibration might shorten that quite a bit! That said, it would seem to be quite a bit longer than optical media. Everyone assumes that CD/DVD's last a long time however those burned at home on a CD/DVD burned do not last anywhere close to as long as commercially produced ones. I've had CD's go bad in as little as 3 years. There are now though some archival discs designed for 100+ years. I myself store them on hard drives and lock them up. Once a year I pull the drives out and run them for a bit to make sure everything is good and put them away again. in 50 years you will have an hard time reading that data off an Ide drive
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space bar is broken |
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Hayward
K A R - 1 2 0 C
Premium
join:2000-07-13
Key West, FL
edit:
May 12th, @04:35AM
| reply to iSpark
Yes a HD layed away (not accessed/spinning) is probably the longest lasting mag format.... but it is magnetic so it must be kept away from even weak mag fields, like say a electric fan, speakers, or CRT monitor.
Actually it floored me in this credit card era, there are people still making mag closure wallets... bye bye just swipping your credit card, you keep it there long.
And also mag media deteriorates uniformly.... the oraganized particle was to return to background randomness
vs optical media that tends to spot wear out/deteriorate.
No peple claimed that VHS/Beta tape had a 10 year lifetime but have 25 year old (stored) tapes that still play...maybe less well than new recorded but still do... so how long who know... but definately not forever.
And then again there is the format thing... most computers still deal with IDE, but SATA has pretty much taken over... so again how long on that count too.
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»haywardm.com (Hayward's Key West)
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pog
Premium
join:2004-06-03
Kihei, HI
·Hawaiian Telcom
| reply to punker
said by punker :... in 50 years you will have an hard time reading that data off an Ide drive IMO, the best approach is to keep your data alive on-system and treat backups as backups. I have files in my data partition that are from the '80s... these have migrated with me, from one old machine to the next new machine, all this time.
I have often come close to filling whatever media I had available to me at the time but I've always been able to upgrade to new drives with more than enough room to move forward with.
Basically, when I move to a new system, I install the OS to its own partition and copy over my data to another partition... I use another drive in the system to hold images of the OS and 1:1 copies of the data. These days, I also have copies of the same held in external HDs. I have a box full of old, retired drives that may still work but I don't really need them to work. 
By having a live version of all my files on my system, the only real obsolescence issues I've come across are filetype support... old files without an app capable of reading them. None of these are real important, though.
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My Site |
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Hayward
K A R - 1 2 0 C
Premium
join:2000-07-13
Key West, FL
edit:
May 12th, @04:40AM
| reply to punker
said by punker : in 50 years you will have an hard time reading that data off an Ide drive But again because the data is gone or just no existing machine knows what IDE is anymore.
Then again that far out even if optical lasts that long and disks the same size, will any drive still know what current optical standards are?
And in 5 years probably something beyond SATA... so how long will those stored drives be good for?
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»haywardm.com (Hayward's Key West)
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jjoshua
Premium
join:2001-06-01
Scotch Plains, NJ | reply to iSpark
In the long run, your best bet is to print a few copies, put some in an album and pass along the rest.
Photos on a stored hard drive can't be enjoyed. |
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AnonShawUser
join:2006-06-17
Calgary, AB
| reply to iSpark
Coming from the more geeky side of things and not so much the photographer side, I suggest you use a program like quickpar to create a few sets of parity files. If you want to store a full HDD worth of data (not entirely recommended, due to drive failure possibility), spend some time to create parity for the data that you can save on a DVD. For a 500GB drive, 1 full DVD of parity, done between 3 and 4 sets (break up the images into folders to do it easily) could help keep your mind at ease while the data is in storage. If you go back 2 or 3 years later and find that some of the images have become corrupted, you could just run the parity files through it and get your pictures all up and running properly again.
The unfortunate part is that creating parity for such a huge amount of data can be quite time-consuming, depending on the computer you're using.
The alternative, if you wanted to really make sure everything is working, would be to assemble an inexpensive RAID5 or RAID6. Most modern motherboards support RAID5 through their SATA, and for a bit of investment you could get a full RAID card and use that to get your RAID6. With RAID5 you get a full drive of parity, while RAID6 gives you two, but otherwise just lets you work with all the drives as if they were a single one. The benefit there is that once it's built, you just need to plug into it when you want to offload your images, then you can put the RAID server back in storage so it's not using a lot of power to do nothing. If one (or two in RAID6) drive fails, you'll be informed of this and can go get another drive of the same size to drop in, and make sure all your data is kept safe and secure.
Yeah, it's a little more technical than just offloading to a spare HDD, but there isn't really all too much to it, if you know enough to even install your operating system, or assemble a computer from parts. |
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james1
join:2001-02-26
antarctica | reply to iSpark
I can't wait until a really huge sunspot hits and we lose all our magnetic data (not to mention all the tiny electronics that would be fried by the induced current) |
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punker
deleted by moderator
Premium
join:2004-06-21
Palmdale, CA
clubs:
edit:
May 12th, @05:32PM
| reply to Hayward
SATA will be moving to v3 (600Megabyte/s)
it looks like it will be using the same port and will have Backwards compatibility |
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Cable_Guy
@charter.com
| reply to iSpark
I use the cheap internal drives with this adapter.
»3btech.net/de3sausb20ex.html
I don't need to crack open the case, I can swap out the drives as needed and can even hook CDROM drives up if needed. It also has a backup button that when the software is installed on your pc, it does a full system backup. |
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Hayward
K A R - 1 2 0 C
Premium
join:2000-07-13
Key West, FL
edit:
May 13th, @12:07AM
| Assuming the M$ PC or A$ Mac...
How about the rest of the world like Linux that FAR out strips Mac and making major inroads on Microsoft. Any idea of how STANDARD a device it is?
For instnace does it require any drivers for MS or Mac, that are not already in the OS as standard devices?
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»haywardm.com (Hayward's Key West)
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