C.H.Ling wrote:
>
> Few months ago I have transferred over 70 CD-Rs to DVD and non of the CD-R
> are non-readable. A few of them were over 4 years old, I worry about hard
> disk more than CD-R. I had three hard disk failures in 12 years. Although
> two of them are over-heat due to careless use.
------------------------------------------------
I've had two serious drive failures that were each about 3 years apart.
I haven't had more because I've tended to upgrade in less than 3 years.
The two current drives (one a backup of the other) recently started
getting some I/O errors off about 50 bad sectors each. This seemed to
develop suddenly and I think it was due either to a failing drive
controller on the previous motherboard or perhaps just due to a
different controller on the new motherboard that replaced it. The
replacement board was a later engineering revision of the original.
I cleaned it up with SpinRite from Gibson Research <http://www.grc.com/>
but the errors were so bad that SpinRite couldn't recover any
significant amount of data. It will read a sector up to 2000 times in
an attempt to build a statistically probable interpretation of the bits.
Ultimately, the bad sectors had to be remapped.
All of this trouble led to some email communication with Steve Gibson
the creator of SpinRite. One amazing bit of knowledge that I picked up
was that current drive densities are so high that almost every I/O
operation results in errors that have to be corrected by the ECC logic
in the drive. Error correction is no longer a sometimes thing but an
almost always thing. You can run SpinRite periodically to let it check
for and restore or replace weak sectors.
Don't neglect those backups.
Chuck Norcutt
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