[Coco] Sigh of relief, refresh your floppies!

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 26 March 2010, Stephen H. Fischer wrote:
>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?
>
I've not found it to be a problem in the drives I've had in my care.  It 
seems like if the data can fade, the intergap stuff could too, but I've not 
seen evidence that would lead me to that conclusion _yet_.
>
>SHF
>
>
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-- 
Cheers, Gene
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