Large IDE Drives as Long-Term Archival Media?

PlatterMan asks: "The question of how to cope with backing up disk drives which are rapidly increasing in size, onto tape and other backup devices which aren't scaling in size as quickly isn't new to Slashdot. Neither is the use of single, raided, and removal disks as backup devices, this has been covered numerous times on Slashdot in e.g. here and here. One thing I haven't really seen discussed however is the feasibility of disk drives as medium to long-term archival media, say 5 to 10 years. Like many people I'm in the position of now having multiple machines with a combined data pool of about 220 Gig, and backing up these onto DDS or DLT tapes is slow and manual to do, and expensive in tape costs. So I'm looking to add a removal drive bay to my primary backup machine and pick up a bunch of large IDE drives, so that I can do regular disk to disk backups over 100 Meg Ethernet (and for my machines which are in cages, over the Net) pulling out and alternating the backup drives on a 3-way backup cycle."

"Backups are of no use without offsite archival copies so I plan to take one set of disks out of the pool, and archive them offsite on a quarterly basis.

However, I've heard horror stories about the data retention and usability off older disks which have been shelved for archival, for example disk stiction - where people try to restore data off of a 4 to 5 year old drive only to find that the disk won't spin up due to solidification of lubricants, or that they've experienced data degradation.

I'd be interested in the Slashdot crowd's opinion on using large IDE drives as an archival media. Clearly one possible problem is being able to get hold of a machine in the future with a suitable IDE interface to plug them into for restoration, but I can't see IDE disappearing within 5 years (maybe 10 though). I'm more interested in experiences and opinions on the suitability of the disks themselves for long-term archival.

• Is stiction still likely occur on newer makes of IDE drives or have manufacturers beaten the problems which caused this in the past?
• Likewise how likely is bit drop-out and general data degradation over say a 5 year and 10 year period, and what do people think would be the likely maximum feasible time that a shelved drive would be usable for?
• Any suggestions as to how would I need to store drives in order to minimize these types of problem and maximise their feasible life as archival media.

Thanks!"

Comments

Here's a tip..

[Profane Motherfucker]

If you have to ask, then my guess is that using cheap fucking flea market IDE drives in lieu of some truly Archival storage will fuck you in the end. IDE drives are shitty. Newer ones are even shittier. A hard disk isn't meant to last 10 years, and you'd be a fucking loon to think it would.

Hell, unless it's some ultra common file type, like text, who the fuck says you'll be even able to open it? That shit will be packed tight in the most archival storage, (not on ghetto shit IDE) but what the fuck good will it be? Look in the non-archival slashdot archives for the archival storage story about the BBC -- their storage medium outlasted the computer they'd designed for it.

Granted, that's stupid bullshit thinking on the part of the BBC, but don't fall in their footsteps. Get tapes. Good tapes. Lots of them. And a valut.

I'll tell you why you've not heard discussion about this before: it's a Bad Fucking Idea.

Re:Steve Gibson

[Omnifarious]

So, you're saying that tapes are good forever?