[Coco] Sigh of relief, refresh your floppies!

[Stephen H. Fischer]

Hi,

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gene Heskett" <gene.heskett at verizon.net>
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Friday, March 26, 2010 6:18 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] Sigh of relief, refresh your floppies!


> On Friday 26 March 2010, Stephen H. Fischer wrote:
>>Hi,
...
>>
>>Question: Do hard disks need to be low level formatted after many years.
>>Don't they have the same problem as floppies?
>>
> They claim not.  But personal experience says that they do tend to suffer
> from a phenom called multipass erasure, and actually at about the same 
> rate
> as a video tape does.  In our commercial servers at the tv station, where 
> we
> had largely switched to mpeg playbacks from 10k rpm scsi drives about 12
> years ago, we found that we needed to burn a copy of the finished 
> commercial
> to cd, and carefully index and catalog then for easy retrieval should the
> hard drive copy go flaky.  And it did, sometimes in as little as 50 plays.
> Recopy right over the failing file from the cd and it was good for another
> 2-6 weeks.  And when we got tired of paying $400 for an 8GB scsi-2 drives
> that lasted 90 days & swapped it out for 100+ Gb ata drives that would run
> for a year or more, that fade effect remained.  Now we have 1Tb drives for
> $90 at Staples, and I haven't had that effect me here unless the drive was
> about to sign off for good.  But we're still backing up the commercials on
> optical media, the conversion to hi-def didn't negate that need.
>
> FWIW, it takes about $20,000 in fauncy machinery to actually do a low 
> level
> format on todays hard drives, they lost that ability at about the same 
> time
> scsi-2 came on the scene.

I was thinking about the sector marks. The data area is rewritten often but 
only a low level format writes that part of the surface AFAIK.

So the ones and zero can move around there just like on floppies, right?


SHF