Technology

59366 readers

3995 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

470

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

152 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

I have a feeling USB drives will be readable for a long time to come, considering that we still use the standard almoat everywhere, nearly 28 years after its introduction.

That said, copying the data from old archives into new formats is always a good idea

Edit: I was envisioning actual external hard disk or solid state drives accessible using a USB connection. Thumb drives and other ultra-portable data formats are notorious for poor data integrity over time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

I have a feeling USB drives will be readable for a long time to come

The drives may still be useful, but the data will long be gone. I have a flash drive from 06 that was last used in like 08 09 and most of it's data was gone by 2019. The drive itself is fine. But what was on it has slowly faded away.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Note though that usb Sticks (if you mean that with USB drives) usually get the worst, cheapest quality flash. It's a lottery, and expect nothing in no-name sticks.

* quality in yield, ssd > sd-card/emmc > flash sticks

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I've got several flash drives from 2 different brands that are less than 3 years old that are already dying. SanDisk and Lexar, both large brands and they're already losing reliability. Real shame that the older stuff works longer. I really only need them for making Linux bootable drives and they struggle with that.