29 Jan
2014
29 Jan
'14
5:37 p.m.
> 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"