On 03/13/2012 05:23 PM, Les Mikesell wrote: > On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Tilman Schmidt > <t.schmidt at phoenixsoftware.de> wrote: >> Am 13.03.2012 19:46, schrieb m.roth at 5-cent.us: >>> Markus Falb wrote: >>>> On 12.3.2012 01:37, Mark LaPierre wrote: >>>>> Tape, and tape drives, have a bad reputation. They are difficult and >>>>> time consuming to verify. >>>> Harddisks have a bad reputation too. They fail regulary. >>>> >>> Not that frequently. >> I beg to differ. Hard disk failures are by far the most frequent >> hardware problem I encounter at work. > Don't forget to scale that by the number of hard disks you have per > motherboard - they are probably also your most common component... > And in my experience those failures are clustered within the first few > months or out about 5 years. > 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. Even so, I still choose multiple different backup format. But if long term archival is important, I think I would be doing some data refreshing after a few years of service from backup drives. Nataraj