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Offline Storage for Hard Drives?
rrsipov asks: "I work at a small company that processes a good deal of DV (mainly) format video. After trying a number of different technologies we have settled down to using removable hard drives for file storage and backup. When a set of projects are complete, the hard disk they are stored on can be removed and stored offline so that the material is available in for possible future use. The problem is that unlike tapes, etc... we haven't been able to find any good storage cabinet type solutions, and have resorted to a pretty much ad-hoc system of filing the drives. Does Slashdot know of any such system? Ideally we'd like to start with something small, and scale from there if we like the system."
What is the shelf life of an unconnected idle hard drive? Lots of times, mechanical devices don't like to sit unused for long periods, as corrosion can build up or even metal parts can fuse together.
Just like it is important to excersize bigger bearings occasionally (e.g., trailer wheel bearings can go kaput if left alone for a few years), do hard drives suffer from similar problems?
If you're just storing bare drives, try to get ahold of the shipping boxes that manufacturers send 20-packs in. If you're storing that many drives, they're probably going to be the most efficient and safest way to do it. If you're *buying* drives in that quantity, or can consider doing so in the future, you can probably manage to make sure you'll get the box too. You might be able to scam them off of local computer stores too. You could probably glue a laminated sheet of paper to it with a template and [dry|wet]-erase mark what's in each slot on the outside. Make sure you have plenty of good-condition static bags though.
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I'd re-evaluate tapes... a HDD depends on both the magnet medium and the conected electronics. With a tape, the medium is seperated from the physical components that make it go (The other advantage is that tapes can be read in by anyone to recover data, where as a HDD would need a clean room). Tapes are slower to read data back from, but if the HDDs are stored offline like you are, then this isn't an issue. By the sounds of it, once it's on your offline HDDs you are removing it from your servers. I'd be pretty nervous about that and recomend that you make at least two copies in case one fails. If you want to be serious about you should use an off-site storage facillity, and a comercial storage facility would probably only deal with tapes.
I'm assuming you're using hotswap bays. That means your drives are in handy little cases with handles and all. Why not just build a special shelf with several hundred little slots shaped for the hotswap cases? Pull a drive from a PC, slide it into a slot.
Get a bundle of plastic hot swap cases(minus the hardware) and put together a cubby hole structure sized to fit them. Easily organized, and the drives will have at least some amount of protection from handling.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
If you've got lots of drives to deal with, pick up a standard adjustable bookshelf at IKEA or something, and buy or make a few extra shelves for it since you don't need as much height. You can stick labels on the shelf edges to keep them sorted.
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If these are hot-swappable drives in cages, then a cardboard box or a milk crate in a cool dry environment should be adequate. You want to avoid dust, so make sure the box or crate is covered. Putting them in a lockable filing cabinet would be a good idea.
I haven't seen any IKEA-esque prefab shelving meant for HD cages. Of course, if you have the budget for it, many custom furniture contractors will build you a filing cabinet with shelves or pigeon holes that fit the dimensions of the HD cages. Not too expensive.
If the drives are not in hot-swap cages, then store them in the anti-static bags they came in. If you can afford USB/Firewire enclosures, there are stackable single-HD enclosures and multi-HD enclosures. You'll want to spin the drives up once every few months, so an enclosure is better than anti-static bags.
Either way, just remember to label all the drives. It's no fun hunting through 50 unlabelled HDs for a particular file.
It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.
I agree with the other guys. Disk drives that are unused have a shelf life of about 5 years. The medium does need to be read read once in a while. And yes the electronics can go bad.
For tapes, the secret is to make and test multiple copies of the tape. I suggest 3. And pay a company that specializes is tape archives to store the tape.
Make sure you understand how to maintain your tape drive. Mostly make sure you use the cleaning tape to clean the heads on a very regular basis.
If you can afford it, get 2 drives. Write the data on one and verify the data on another.
The bigest ememy for tapes is climate. You do not want humidity or temerature to change.
What is the value of the data? What if there is a disaster and these tapes are required?
You should have one storage company locally, and another out of state.
Depending on the number of tapes, you are not talking about a lot of money for storing the tapes.
Your greybeard mainframe elders have been dealing with this problem for 50 years.
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Of course, with all that data sitting in 12' of floor space, a little fire could do a whole lot of damage. Get off-site storage!!!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
"Disk which aren't used are almost as likely to fail as those that are used all the time due to problems with the lubricant."
Do you have a link to research that shows that is correct?
Several years ago, hard drives had a problem called stiction. I understood stiction had been completely cured.
I know of no physical principle which would cause hard drives to stick now. It can be expected that the lubrication will migrate, but that should take decades.
A good cure for stiction was to rotate the drive quickly back and forth around the spindle axis. The inertia would break the spindle free. I've done that successfully.
We just installed a number of these Gemtrac units for DLT tape storage. They can be ordered with a variety of different shelves for different storage needs, but are the highest density storage solution that we could find. I'm pretty sure you can get shelves for HDD storage but you'd have to contact Russ Bassett to find out for sure.
l estorage.cfm
http://www.russbassett.com/filestorage/gemtrac_fi
I used to work in a hardware shop with a big, sturdy, shelf of new and second hand drives. One day we had some decoraters come in and ... bang ... they knocked the whole shelf over.
I would take a look at what Unitrends is doing. They have backup systems with a removable Hard Drive component and aluminum cases for thier hard drives. SATA drives I think. You can google them up and talk with a sales guy.
Cheap storage VM.
Whatever you do, don't forget to toss a silica-gel pack in your (hopefully) hermetically sealed storage. You wouldn't want moisture to slowly eat your drives, would you?
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
How about a citation? Hard drives are a magnetic storage media. I have cassette tapes that are ten years old and know people who have reel to reel tapes that are five times that old - the music hasn't magically disappeared from those tapes and they've been sitting in paper boxes on bookshelves. Here we have media created in a cleanroom and stored in a sealed chamber and you're saying it "expires" in just a few years?
I call bullshit. Let's see some objective studies to back up this assertion.
I agree with the first paragraph, that's the way to free a stuck spindle.
RLL hard disks! Bad memories.
Really, use it. HDD's are really unreliable. They have too many bits that can break, the drive electronics can go bad, which you can sometimes solve by replacing a logic board from another identical HDD, but would you want to? Then there's the disks themselves that can go bad or fail to spin up because they've been lying on a shelf for a long time. Correctly stored tapes can last 30 years and when I say correctly, I mean in a vault of an offsite tape storage company which maintains proper humidity and temperature. I'd use LTO or DLT tapes, as these are the most ubiquitous and the drives tend to have the best build quality. The drive can be a significant investment, but tapes are cheap, I think you can get $22 for 200GB nowadays.