Music Industry's 1990s Hard Drives Are Dying

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable. Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone's data stored on spinning disks. 'In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know,' Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. 'It may sound like a sales pitch, but it's not; it's a call for action.'

Hard drives gained popularity over spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived downsides of tape, including deterioration from substrate separation and fire. But hard drives present their own archival problems. Standard hard drives were also not designed for long-term archival use. You can almost never decouple the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside, so that if either fails, the whole drive dies. There are also general computer storage issues, including the separation of samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats requiring archival versions of software. Still, Iron Mountain tells Mix that 'If the disk platters spin and aren't damaged,' it can access the content.

But 'if it spins' is becoming a big question mark. Musicians and studios now digging into their archives to remaster tracks often find that drives, even when stored at industry-standard temperature and humidity, have failed in some way, with no partial recovery option available. 'It's so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,' Koszela says. 'Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything's in order. And both of them are bricks.' 'Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.,' writes Hacker News user abracadaniel in a discussion post about the article. 'Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you'd expect.'

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