A 2.5" HDD isn't the same kind of media as an M-DISC. Magnetic storage will lose its charge over time. I've lost content from bitrot on magnetic media many times as well. Arguing I won't be able to read an M-DISC in 10 years because your magnetic media wore out in 5 years is beyond comparing apples to oranges.
> It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one.
I've got a pile of them already. I'll likely keep at least one, probably multiple, along with the optical drive/enclsure (of which I do have multiple as well). I imagine if I hold on to a new in box USB optical drive it will also probably have a cable. So in 10 years when I need to get the data off the drive, I'll probably just use the cable that's right there with the drive that's currently sitting on my desk.
I can go down the street to Microcenter right now and buy one, they have dozens of cables in-stock in-person. There are other stores around in-person which also still sell them. There's loads of vendors online which sell them new today. To my eyes they're not hard to find today at least. I can't imagine in 10 years I'll have somehow exhausted the cables I currently have and will need to source one and there won't even be a listing on ebay for one when there's probably at least many hundreds of millions if not billions of them in existence at the moment. For reference, every PS3 had a mini-USB cable, and there were >84M of those sold. How many other devices came with a mini-USB cable? How many were manufactured and sold on their own? How many are still being produced?
I can't imagine there being probably near billions of something existing and then disappearing entirely a decade from now, other than some kind of food or truly disposable item.
Hmm, I've seen old HDDs fail to spin up or otherwise have catastrophic malfunction, but never heard of them having real bit rot.
I recently booted up some portable PCs from around 1990 to review their HDD content and scrub the disk state before handing them over as e-waste. Easily 25 years on the shelf. I would think you'd have to do something very wrong like storing the HDD near a degausser to lose the magnetic recording.
I do think that SSDs and particularly cheap flash "thumb drives" are capable of having bit rot when left on the shelf for many years.
Did you actually validate every bit was exactly right on the drive? Did you even have the information to validate that data? Not just that they booted up without a noticeable error, but that every bit was exactly as written 25 years ago? How many drives did you test, how many manufacturers?
Most of the bits will probably be fine. Some of them probably won't be. The rate depends on a myriad of factors. Even within a brand different models will be better or worse, and it's not exactly a metric you'll find listed. And then yes the way they're stored is also a factor and even the environment when the data was written.
I've had drives from the 80s still work and still pretty much have all the data. I've had files get corrupted on modern drives with no other explanation than bitrot. Even just cosmic rays can eventually flip some bits.
Fair enough, I did not have checksums to compare. And I only randomly sampled the contents, not every single file. But yes, it booted and every program I tried executed normally and every data file I inspected seemed valid.
I do have some familiarity with how such old systems would misbehave with corrupt data, such as from bad data cables. I didn't see any of those kinds of symptoms and so do not think there was any significant storage decay from being on the shelf at least 5x longer than the 5 year interval mentioned up thread. I tend to think that such a failing drive must have had some other kind of damage and not just some kind of spontaneous demagnetization
Another thing to remember is some of the really older disks will have larger magnetic areas as platter density wasn't nearly as much. As densities increased the amount of total charge per bit decreased as there's just less magnetic material available. Just one of the many factors of how likely you are to experience any issues.
Refreshing every five years for magnetic storage is probably overly cautious to me from my own personal experiences. But FWIW if it's data I really care about it doesn't spend years sitting around on just magnetic media. For my own personal risk tolerance putting important data on say an external hard drive and sticking it on a shelf isn't a great way to archive data. I might do it with data I'm OK with eventually maybe losing, but if it's something I know I'll want in 20+ years it gets a few copies with one being on some highly reliable optical media like M-DISC.
Your hard drive might go a long, long time without losing a bit. And maybe if you do lose some data, it's a couple of typos in some help file. Maybe it's some rare code path in an executable that almost never gets called. Maybe it's some b-frame in a video that you'd never even notice. Maybe it's some important bits of the last photo you had of a loved one. Maybe it's some important field a database. Maybe it was empty space. Who knows.
It's more about winning a jackpot in storage lottery. That HDD shouldn't had that data corrupted so bad, yet it did.
> I've got a pile of them already
And I have at least two without actually looking in the 'cables box'. 10-15 years ago I had from five to ten of them at any time, but what about some time later?
> along with the optical drive/enclsure
My desktop DVD drive just quietly died after prolonged period of no usage, just being powered on. You know when I found out? When I needed to read a DVD.
> Microcenter right now and buy one, they have dozens of cables in-stock in-person
Now? Sure. Two years ago I even saw an Apple 30-pin cable in the same type of store (and I checked now, they still sell it, even in two colours). Would there be a 30-pin cables on sale in 10 years? Doubt so, even in 5 is questionable.
And now everyone and their grandmother are moving to Type-C for everything. The same store has no Type-A -> mini-USB cables, except the weird one with additional miniJack on the Type-A side.
> I can't imagine
You can't. Do you still have Nokia thin charger? Moto CE-Bus?
And you missed the point arguing about specifically mini-USB. Sure there are a lot of mini-USB cables out there. But at some point most of them would be in the dumpster pile. Just like Wide SCSI and FireWire cables now.
> That HDD shouldn't had that data corrupted so bad, yet it did.
No, that sounds like just what I'd expect from magnetic storage.
> Now? Sure.
Well yeah, you specifically scoped it to today in your comment with the words "right now". And no, it's not the weird multi-head variety, they have just regular USB-A to mini-USB. And then thanks for showing that even a decade after the dock connector was phased out it's still easily to find the cables in store today. And thanks for pointing out there's multiple varieties of MiniUSB cables sold today, really reinforcing the idea it's still easy to find.
> Do you still have Nokia thin charger? Moto CE-Bus?
No, but neither of those were even a fraction of market penetration as MiniUSB. My household maybe had one Nokia charger that wasn't just a barrel (of which yes we still have compatible barrel connectors despite being nearly 30 years since). Meanwhile my household has probably received close to 50+ MiniUSB cables over the decades.
Are you seriously arguing Moto CE-Bus was as popular as MiniUSB?
> Just like Wide SCSI and FireWire cables now.
Well if they're like SCSI and Firewire cables today I guess I shouldn't have a problem. There's Firewire in-stock in-person at Microcenter today, right now, as well. eBay and Amazon has tons of listings for SCSI cables, I could get a dozen in just a few days. So it sounds like it should be pretty easy to find MiniUSB if Firewire is the earlier example.
I expilicitly said there is 1 (one) miniUSB cable available at my local MC co7nterpart, and it's not even a generic one.
Dock connector is rarer than miniUSB (I don't think you would argue that?) and the reason it is still there is probably because this is an old stock. As soon as the sales drop low enough it would be in the landfill, just like USB floppies and miniUSB cables in the stores near me.
miniUSB wasn't the best example but right now (and it was my point in the first place) it goes through the same process it did with all the serial and custom data ports 15 years ago.
You nd me wouldn't have trouble procuring miniUSB for a couple decades (cable box!) but overall their availability would decline and in 10 years an Average Joe would need to search if he would need to plug in an old WD Passport from 2005.
edit:
> No, that sounds like just what I'd expect from magnetic storage.
No, that is not what I expect from an hdd. I've seen mulitple failures in my life, that was quite atypical. Most drives from that era or dead mechanically or fine, but not that
I guess Average Joes just can't figure out the complex ordering or Amazon or eBay. Because by your own examples of actually common, as in even remotely as common as MiniUSB, they're on there. You need a 25-pin serial cable? How long? What color? You need a SCSI terminator? You think those were even as remotely as common as MiniUSB? How many are on eBay right now? There's at least five pages of listings and I imagine there were many many times more MiniUSB cables out there.
And even then, that's fine. It's still not going to limit me from playing back my optical disks. They made optical drives with IDE, SATA, MiniUSB, micro USB, USB-B, eSATA, SCSI, etc. What are the odds all of these, along with all potential adapters, disappear?
Sigh.
> I've seen mulitple failures in my life, that was quite atypical.
I've seen that exact same kind of failure close to a dozen times in my life, mostly from a select few models iirc. Then again though my sample size of magnetic drives is probably >300 or so, a bit atypical id imagine. It's not an extremely rare thing to happen especially to low power 2.5" portable drives powered by USB.
> It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one.
I've got a pile of them already. I'll likely keep at least one, probably multiple, along with the optical drive/enclsure (of which I do have multiple as well). I imagine if I hold on to a new in box USB optical drive it will also probably have a cable. So in 10 years when I need to get the data off the drive, I'll probably just use the cable that's right there with the drive that's currently sitting on my desk.
I can go down the street to Microcenter right now and buy one, they have dozens of cables in-stock in-person. There are other stores around in-person which also still sell them. There's loads of vendors online which sell them new today. To my eyes they're not hard to find today at least. I can't imagine in 10 years I'll have somehow exhausted the cables I currently have and will need to source one and there won't even be a listing on ebay for one when there's probably at least many hundreds of millions if not billions of them in existence at the moment. For reference, every PS3 had a mini-USB cable, and there were >84M of those sold. How many other devices came with a mini-USB cable? How many were manufactured and sold on their own? How many are still being produced?
I can't imagine there being probably near billions of something existing and then disappearing entirely a decade from now, other than some kind of food or truly disposable item.