> how often
(x times per y years) should old equipment be powered on to
> safegaurd them? drives, systems, etc?
> How about turning on a hard drive and doing a read of the whole disk
> just to revive the magnetic flux?
On Wed, 29 Jan 2014, Paul Koning wrote:
That?s not how disks (or tapes) work. You may be
thinking of the
read/restore cycle in core memory (or the shift register cycling of
bubble memory). For disks and tapes and floppies, read is passive; it
should not affect the stored flux but it most definitely does not
?revive? it.
Reading media to get all the data and write it to new media may be worth
doing, to deal with the possibility of the media going bad.
It also MIGHT help a
little with lubricants that are starting to "harden"
For media it self there are magnetic considerations (print through) and
other time related defects like oxide shedding. All media should be on
alternate media that has a known lifetime and is reproducible before
failure.
As to drives anything with lubricants have a clock ticking use or no.
Dust is also a problem so they shoudl be covered to avoid that.
If the environment is not benign then ruct/corrosion and possibly vermin
can attack.
Then you have the possibility of electrical problems that are age and
temperature (usually high temps are bad) related.
As to bubble memory I have two and I have no idea if they have
wearout or age issues. Any ideas on that? The ones I have are
the intel bubble memory modules (non pc ) each of 128K each.
Allison