On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Tilman Schmidt t.schmidt@phoenixsoftware.de wrote:
Am 14.03.2012 03:05, schrieb Nataraj:
I would have to dig up some references, but I have read some articles that claim that the reliability of a drive that is in full time operation in a server, running 24hrs/day and maybe even seeking under heavy load is way different than a drive that you run for a day or two and then it sits in an environmentally controlled storage, powered down for most of its lifetime. At least from what I read, the failure rate is much lower for the same drive used under the later conditions.
OTOH I remember reports about drives failing to start after having been powered off for extended time periods. Something about heads sticking to platters or somesuch. Though I don't know if that information still applies to current drive technologies.
Some high-density tapes will fail if you drop them on the floor. I think we can all agree that any media type has the potential to fail, which is why we use multiple copies on different physical media, so if one fails you still have another one. If you are storing all of your backups on a single tape/disk/cd/dvd/bd/holocube, you are doing it wrong.
Is this horse dead yet?
❧ Brian Mathis