5-1/4" floppy disks were more reliable than 3-1/2 inch disks. Especially there at the end, 3-1/2 inch drives and media were pretty poor.
CD media reliability depends on the manufacturer and CD writer. The same goes for DVR+R media which should be tougher because the write layer is sandwiched between two disks. I have only had failures with cheap media. Use a writer which supports reading back the disk and reporting the various correctable errors to verify that the drive and media are working correctly and use the slowest writing speed.
ZIP drives depends on an embedded magnetic servo on the disk so the disks are very fragile. Floptical type drives like the LS-120 were much more reliable.
My shelf of dead hard drives currently includes 5 Maxtors, 1 WD, and 1 Quantum. I also had a group of Seagates (7200.10s? 7200.11s?) get returned a couple weeks after buying them and Seagate's customer support personnel were jerks so I no longer deal with them for anything.
In 38+ years of computing I have had one hard drive failure. A Connor SCSI1 drive, I believe it was. I stopped backing up years ago. The most I do is keep duplicates of important files on separate computers.
I've had about 10 hard drives fail in various things, some people swear by one brand or another but every brand seems to have had a bad series now and then and most have made some really good drives too.
Correctable errors? That's not how CD-R/DVD-R work…
ZIP drives depends on an embedded magnetic servo on the disk so the disks are very fragile. Floptical type drives like the LS-120 were much more reliable.
There's nothing about an embedded servo that makes a disk fragile. That's a totally specious argument. Hard disks rely on embedded servo, too, you know — and at tolerances FAR tighter than in a Zip drive.
There's no evidence that LS120 is any more or less reliable than Zip, but its far smaller adoption makes it hard to really know its failure rate.
Correctable errors? That's not how CD-R/DVD-R work…
That is exactly how they work; CDs and DVDs always have an assortment of correctable errors and so do hard drives.
(1) I do not remember the details for data CDs but for DVDs, there are two layers of error correction with the second layer catching errors that the first layer missed. Good DVD burners (2) have the capability of doing a surface scan to return the number of errors corrected by the first and second layers of error correction and this reveals the general quality of the burned disk. (3) Only uncorrectable errors show up in the typical media verify function.
(1) A major reason hard drives have moved to using larger sector sizes is because error correction becomes less efficient as the physical sector length becomes shorter (greater linear density) compared to the defect density. I suspect the same thing was responsible for larger sector sizes in higher density MO disks except where compatibility was required. DVDs had this covered from the start with larger sector sizes and a combination of short and long error correction to handle a much more hostile environment.
(2) Plextor burners were good for this until they stopped making their own drives.
Quote from: tookiZIP drives depends on an embedded magnetic servo on the disk so the disks are very fragile. Floptical type drives like the LS-120 were much more reliable.There's nothing about an embedded servo that makes a disk fragile. That's a totally specious argument. Hard disks rely on embedded servo, too, you know — and at tolerances FAR tighter than in a Zip drive.
It is not the embedded servo itself but the embedded servo in combination with the low coercivity of Zip media. This makes it possible to easily erase the magnetic servo with an external magnetic field at which point the disk is trashed because the drive has no way to reformat it.
I have always wondered if the loss of the embedded servo tracks on Zip media was responsible for damaging the drive leading to the click of death but I avoided them and Jaz drives.
I decided using an embedded servo on soft media was bad idea from the start except for planned obsolescence.
The old Syquest drives were the same way but with a "hard" magnetic media, damaging the embedded servo was not likely; I never saw it happen but with a flying head, head crashes were always possible.
QuoteThere's no evidence that LS120 is any more or less reliable than Zip, but its far smaller adoption makes it hard to really know its failure rate.At least when I accidentally wipe an LS120 disk with a magnet, I can reformat it and use it.
I never used LS120 in any significant way either but only because it never became popular and I was already using 3-1/2 inch MO
although I think burnable CDs and DVDs are even better for archival and backup purposes because you cannot make a mistake and erase your old data.
MO disks are the best as far as toughness since they are "hard" magnetic media except during the write process, use optical tracking so the embedded servo data is permanent, and are a non-contact media. Unfortunately optics limit areal density compared to magnetic media.
The Jaz was a totally different technology (removable hard disk, same as SyQuest and Orb). Its click of death was basically "standard" hard disk seek errors, plus dust ingress, dust created by shutter wear, etc.
QuoteThere's no evidence that LS120 is any more or less reliable than Zip, but its far smaller adoption makes it hard to really know its failure rate.At least when I accidentally wipe an LS120 disk with a magnet, I can reformat it and use it.For sure, a degaussed Zip can't be reused, but I've never actually heard of it happening. As I said, even floppy disks aren't that sensitive to magnets. It takes an oscillating magnetic field to affect them.
I never used LS120 in any significant way either but only because it never became popular and I was already using 3-1/2 inch MO
MO is something I wish had caught on more, too.
MO disks are the best as far as toughness since they are "hard" magnetic media except during the write process, use optical tracking so the embedded servo data is permanent, and are a non-contact media. Unfortunately optics limit areal density compared to magnetic media.
Yep. At least in MiniDisc, it uses a pregroove, much like CD-R. Data MD is something I REALLY wish Sony had developed further. It was such a convenient format, and MiniDisc media has proven to be spectacularly reliable in the long run. (But the Data MD drives Sony made were much, much, much too slow.)
The Jaz was a totally different technology (removable hard disk, same as SyQuest and Orb). Its click of death was basically "standard" hard disk seek errors, plus dust ingress, dust created by shutter wear, etc.
I thought Jaz used a flexible Bernoulli disk. SyQuest used a hard media. Zip was a floppy technology with a head that contacts the film disk but with an embedded servo.
I saw a lot of magnetically erased Zip disks in connection with drives which had suffered the click of death. I only encountered a few floppy disks which had been magnetically erased but I suspect people were more aware and careful with them.
It definitely did not take much of a magnet to degauss a floppy diskette. I tested this several times and the swipes could be seen with a good surface scan utility.
Apparently MO was more popular outside the US. Sony's MiniDisc was of course popular in Japan.
I was aware of Sony's MiniDisc but even back then I was avoiding everything Sony touched.
My MO drives were all made by Fujitsu but of course get practically no use now; I have them installed in my legacy systems along with my IDE Zip, LS120, and DVD-RAM drives which I inherited. The DVD-RAM drive is great for recovering damaged CDs and DVDs.
I saw a lot of magnetically erased Zip disks in connection with drives which had suffered the click of death. I only encountered a few floppy disks which had been magnetically erased but I suspect people were more aware and careful with them.Do you know they were magnetically erased? (Can this even be absolutely determined with a consumer drive?) Or had they just been written to by heads so misaligned that other drives could not read it? The only thing I could possibly envision is heads so misaligned that they overwrite the servo track.
It definitely did not take much of a magnet to degauss a floppy diskette. I tested this several times and the swipes could be seen with a good surface scan utility.And yet I remember seeing or reading about actual tests performed, and even things like sticking disks to a fridge with a magnet didn't affect them.
I was aware of Sony's MiniDisc but even back then I was avoiding everything Sony touched.How come? MD was released while Sony was still in its heyday.
I saw a lot of magnetically erased Zip disks in connection with drives which had suffered the click of death. I only encountered a few floppy disks which had been magnetically erased but I suspect people were more aware and careful with them.Do you know they were magnetically erased? (Can this even be absolutely determined with a consumer drive?) Or had they just been written to by heads so misaligned that other drives could not read it? The only thing I could possibly envision is heads so misaligned that they overwrite the servo track.
They could not be formatted indicating a loss of the embedded servo track. I never had a drive to test with at the time but I relayed my concerns to others who did and they confirmed it.
QuoteIt definitely did not take much of a magnet to degauss a floppy diskette. I tested this several times and the swipes could be seen with a good surface scan utility.And yet I remember seeing or reading about actual tests performed, and even things like sticking disks to a fridge with a magnet didn't affect them.
Refrigerator magnets are incredibly weak. I tested using a small horseshoe magnet which is more typical of a useful magnet like a common magnetic parts wand.
QuoteI was aware of Sony's MiniDisc but even back then I was avoiding everything Sony touched.How come? MD was released while Sony was still in its heyday.
The DRM fiasco with MiniDisc audio was enough to discern that Sony had passed their expiration date. The release of their proprietary Memory Stick a couple years later and audio CD root kit reinforced this. Sony is not to be trusted with anything and they can burn in hell as far as I am concerned.
After 20 years of being in storage all the disks were readable, so they had a 30 second data erasure cycle in the microwave, making a nice light show and a smell of well toasted acrylic. The later ones that were not Verbatim, and which were in 50 packs, were almost all not readable, or had many bad sector reads on reading. CDRW disks though, despite having had a good number of erase cycles on them, were still fine, even the scratched ones.
DRM in the music industry only got worse and worse until Apple really fought it by making the iTunes music store DRM-free. (I mean, the writing had been on the wall for years, but without a corporate giant to fight it, we might still have been stuck with the RIAA's demands.)
When Sony's MiniDisc came out, I and my friends were already digitally ripping our CD collections to MP3s (Was that on 486s and Pentiums? Get off my lawn! *shakes fist*) so we had zero interest in their deliberately crippled products.
CD-R depends on the quality of blank discs (earlier ones were better than later, cheaper ones), the drive used to burn it, and the drive used to read it. I've actually had pretty good luck with CD-R, but then again I always bought premium discs, and always kept them in binders that keep them away from any light.
CD-R depends on the quality of blank discs (earlier ones were better than later, cheaper ones), the drive used to burn it, and the drive used to read it. I've actually had pretty good luck with CD-R, but then again I always bought premium discs, and always kept them in binders that keep them away from any light.Same here. The trick is to use low writing speeds like 4x or 8x and good A-brand discs like Philips or Sony.
@tooki: good MP3 players which worked on a P1-133MHz where available in 1995 /1996. I know for sure because that is what the file date says on my first MP3s. And they don't sound awful. By that time hard drives started to get really cheap as well.
I don't know if it's the right area of the forum, I'd like to discuss about CDROM, DVDRAM, IomegaZip, MO-disks, tapes etc, and their data reliability
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Say, about me, I don't usually need Terabyte, 4.5Gbyte of media is more than OK since I usually need to archive projects, composed by C/C++/Ada sources, followed by tons of pdf and EagleCAD and gEDA sources.
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thanks for your answers, guys, very appreciated
I am in the process of building a new SCSI media-tower loaded with
- DLT8000 tape (IBM tapes)
- DDS4 tape (IBM tapes)
- CD writer (Plextor writer, Verbatim premium dry-CDs)
- DVDRAM
- micro, mechanical removable hard drive (CF2 Microdrive)
- common 3.5" mechanical removable hard drive (SCA-80)
I am duplicating my backups in different kind of media in order to have more probability to have them preserved.
A far, far, far more practical solution is to back up/archive to hard disks — multiple ones. And then every few years, copy those to new drives.
And store your backup disks/discs in several offsite locations.