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Data retention
Jul. 11th, 2009 12:17 pmDoes anyone manufacture external hard drives which they are actually confident work reliably in the medium term? Say, equipped with a five year warranty with free data recovery in the first three years. There are no manufacturers who do not have at least some serious negative 'worked for two weeks then broke' reviews of at least some of their products on the Net.
I found last night that one I'd bought in October 2006 and scarcely used was now an out-of-warranty sealed plastic box that emits metallic clunking noises when plugged in: a useful surreal functionality but not really worth a hundred pounds - for that I would want a much wider range of clunking noises and some evidence that they had been mellifluously tuned, indeed I would want a musical instrument rather than a hard disc drive - nor terribly useful for storing data.
I've bought seven external drives since mid-2005. Of these, two (including last night's) have broken down within a few years of purchase, one languishes on my mathom stand as too small for serious use and not capable of being upgraded to be big enough (though made of chunky aluminium and the prettiest of the lot), three are in active use and the fourth sits on my chest-of-drawers and is swapped with one of the three from time to time to ensure that I have one spinning and one recently-known-to-be-spinning copy of 750GB of miscellaneous factorisation data.
I found last night that one I'd bought in October 2006 and scarcely used was now an out-of-warranty sealed plastic box that emits metallic clunking noises when plugged in: a useful surreal functionality but not really worth a hundred pounds - for that I would want a much wider range of clunking noises and some evidence that they had been mellifluously tuned, indeed I would want a musical instrument rather than a hard disc drive - nor terribly useful for storing data.
I've bought seven external drives since mid-2005. Of these, two (including last night's) have broken down within a few years of purchase, one languishes on my mathom stand as too small for serious use and not capable of being upgraded to be big enough (though made of chunky aluminium and the prettiest of the lot), three are in active use and the fourth sits on my chest-of-drawers and is swapped with one of the three from time to time to ensure that I have one spinning and one recently-known-to-be-spinning copy of 750GB of miscellaneous factorisation data.
