21 Oct
2007
21 Oct
'07
2:44 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 20 Oct 2007 at 19:52, Al Kossow wrote:
I'm glad it's not just me. Almost every single Wabash disk I've come across
seems prone to this - if I'm lucky, there's one chance to read the data, and
the drive heads always need a clean afterwards. More often than not, the
surface comes away though.
Other than Wabash, things seem to hold together pretty well, although I think
I recall having troubles with a batch of Parrot disks a while back (although
in that case they were ones that hadn't been stored in very nice conditions).
Unless you recover the data, what you have is a
physical artifact of a magnetic
storage medium. There is absolutely no way to say what, in fact, is even on it
until you read it. Bits aren't preserved if they exist on only one physical medium,
which you may not be able to recover in the future.
Exactly. I'm starting to see a trend with some brands of floppies
more than 25 years old where the oxide is starting to separate from
the substrate, leading to fouled heads and "see through" tracks.
Mostly on Wabash brand floppies currently, although a few off-brands
such as "Precision" seem to also be showing this behavior. Time to get 'em archived.
Indeed. Although I'm almost more worried about ST412 hard drives, a problem
which seems to often get overlooked (the same can be said of other hard disk
technology, such as SMD). The contents are often far more interesting, but a
sensible procedure for archiving them doesn't really exist short of finding
the original hardware with which they belong and somehow transferring data to
a modern system.
cheers
Jules