I’m not trying to be a flash drive shill, but some of this is nonsense:
Yep. Just like hard drives.
Again, just like a hard drive. I’m failing to see a pertinent difference here.
Finally, drop a hard drive and a flash “key” off a building. Which one do you think will work afterwards?
ETA: again, I am not advocating for flash drive data permanence; I have no idea how well flash stays stable over the long term. I’m just pointing out the problematic issues with flash being quite similar to the same ones in other media.
I’ve been wondering when they would take a MB, put 8 memory slots on it with 2GIG RAM, about 8 USB 2.0 connections with 4GIG flash drives and have a great solid state computer… Should be really fast internally…
I run over 2.2 GIG CPU, 10K RPM hard drives and 800 FSB, quality 2 GIG RAM and I still wanna go faster reliably…
I think that this is what all computers will have eventually. No more mechanical hard drives, but maybe 500 gig flash drives, with the OS on board.
I’m going to go with what you folks have suggested: CD RW disks for backup.
I’ll need RW to do incremental backup (Just overwrite the files that have changed) won’t I? This is getting confusier and confusier! Thanks for all your help.
Here is a rather technical paper on flash memories, from last year. Section V talks about reliability. There is a table there giving reliability vs. leakage current. (Sorry, pasting produces a mess, and I don’t have time to copy it well) 10 years is the best you can expect at low currents. I’d bet the memory in the OP is worse than this. I have CDs that work just fine that are well over 10 years old.
On the other hand, I have three rolls of 30 year old DECtape, which I bet would work fine if I could find a reader closer than the Computer Museum.
In any case, it is nice that they’ve found a way of recycling memories that didn’t quite pass tests. I work in electronic testing, and I wouldn’t buy this without seeing some really good reliability studies.
I still have a computer with SCSI. Your argument is inherently silly. If someone is dumb enough to make a backup onto [whatever] media with [xxx] interface, and then get rid of every computer they have with a [xxx] interface, they’re just being, well, dumb. There’s nothing inherently wrong about saving backups to a SCSI drive, as long as you still have some way of reading SCSI. I’d make you a bet right now that in ten years, I’ll still have a relatively easy way of reading a USB 1.0 drive.
Besides, the poster you were responding to was commenting on the comparable reliability of the media, not the interface. And I’d tend to agree. A modern hard disk is more likely to be intact and readable in ten years than a CD, especially a CD-R.
Fine. Your argument is elitist. Does Joe Blow know what the heck interface his hard disk uses?
I’ll agree with you there.
I don’t know why you feel this is so. I have 10 year or older data CDs. A stack of them. I just took a quick look, and tried several and all the ones I tried read fine. Some examples:
A 1997 game installer CD (Duke Nuke 'em Caribbean, Life’s a Beach, woot!).
An Apple developer CD from 1997 (E.T.O #23).
A CD-R code backup from 1998.
An OS-9 install CD, also 1998.
My fave: A Microsoft Video for Windows SDK CD, v1.1, from 1993.
I can’t believe I still have some of this stuff, but its all readable after languishing in a closet in a stack of jewel cases for many, many moons. Somewhere I’ve got a QuickTime 1.0 CD from 1991, and I’d bet that’s readable too, if I take some time to dig it up.
OTOH, I have zero 10-year-old hard drives, so I can’t attest to their survivability. OTOH, a wouldn’t really want a stack of 10-15 year old hard drives cluttering things up.
I’d think anybody who buys a hard drive (external or bare internal) would find out what interfaces are available on his/her computer, and choose the appropriate hard drive.
Factory-made CD’s should last many decades, as the data is pressed mechanically onto the disk. Recordable optical disks is a whole different matter - the data is recorded by a laser onto a heat-sensitive organic dye. They aren’t terribly stable. There are disks that claim to be “archival quality” but I’m not sure I’d trust my data to it in the long term (decades).
A 500GB external hard drive is smaller than a stack of 100 DVD-R disks.
You’ll please note that I included a 10-ish year old CD-R in my list above. I have stacks of these, and they’ve been pretty reliable whenever I need to go find something I’ve archived.
A couple of mine have already started to go, so this is definitely a case of YMMV. And don’t get me started on iOmega’s Zip disks. I don’t think I have a single one that works.
pulykamell: Well, I wouldn’t say CD backup is infallible by any means. But the statement I was responding to was that “A modern hard disk is more likely to be intact and readable in ten years than a CD, especially a CD-R”, so I dug up a bunch of 10-15 year-old CDs and CD-Rs that were all readable (and then scr4 jumped in with a “well, those don’t count” quip). The plural of “anecdote” is of course not “data”, so I agree that YMMV. I just wonder where the notion that hard drives are stable (or stabler) than other media comes from.
What the heck are you talking about? We were discussing backup methods. Factory-made CD’s are not a backup medium. The data is recorded by a completely different method, one that is only suitable for mass production.
I didn’t say they’d all go blank in less than 10 years. Many or most will last 10 years. Maybe even 30 if stored properly. But don’t be too surprised if they don’t.
scr4, I was responding to (and quoted) Roadfood’s statement: “A modern hard disk is more likely to be intact and readable in ten years than a CD, especially a CD-R.” I guess you can ask him why he dragged CDs into the discussion, rather than writable media.
Probably from the fact that hard drive arrays are now routinely used for critical data archiving (e.g. government records, NASA science data, etc). CD-R’s never were, to my knowledge.
For one thing, you can’t always trust those people to know what they’re doing. I seem to recall NASA having masses of tape data nobody can read.
For another, you aren’t in the same class as NASA. NASA can persuade hardware makers to do special one-offs just so 40-year-old software can keep working.
