The music industry is running out of ’90s hard drives

Enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain handles archiving the media industry’s vaults. A recent finding is a sobering reminder: Nearly a fifth of hard disk drives from the 1990s are completely unreadable.

Music industry publishing mixes spoke to people who support the entertainment industry. The resulting story is partly about how complicated it is to store music now, partly about warning that everyone’s data is stored on spinning disks.

“In our line of work, if we see an inherent problem with a format, it’s prudent to let everyone know,” Robert Kozela, Iron Mountain’s global director of studio development and strategic initiatives, told Mix. “It may sound like sales talk, but it’s not; it’s a call to action.”

Hard drives gained popularity compared to spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing, and editing software were introduced, and tape’s perceived disadvantages, including degradation from substrate separation and Fire. But hard drives present their own archival problems. Standard hard drives also weren’t designed for long-term archival use. You can almost never separate the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside, so if either one fails, the whole drive dies.

In addition, there are the usual computer storage issues, including separating samples and finished tracks, or requiring archival versions of software for proprietary file formats. Still, Iron Mountain tells Mix that “if the disc platters spin and are not damaged,” it can access the material.

But “does it turn around” is becoming a bigger question mark. Musicians and studios now digging into their archives to remaster tracks often find that the drives, even when stored at industry-standard temperatures and humidity, have failed in some way, and there are no partial recovery options available.

“It’s very sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand new case, with the wrappers and tags still on from where they bought it,” says Kozela. “Next to it is a case with a safety drive in it. Everything is organized. And these two are bricks.”

The Triumph of Entropy

Moving Iron Mountain’s warning by Mix Appeared on Hacker News earlier this weekWhich gave rise to other stories of faith in the wrong formats. The gist of it is this: you can’t trust any medium, so you copy important things over and over to new storage. “Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings wear out, flash storage loses charge, etc.” User abracadaniel writes“Entropy wins, sometimes even faster than you expect.”

It is being discussed that SSDs aren’t archival at all; How floppy disk quality varied between the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; Linear Tape-Open, a format specifically designed for long-term tape storage, Loses compatibility in successive generations; The binder sleeves we put CD-R’s and DVD-R’s in cause them to get bent too much and become unreadable.

It’s nothing new to know that hard drives will eventually fail. The five stages of a hard drive’s deathIncluding denials, back in 2005. Last year, the backup company Backblaze shared failure data on specific drivesThis shows that drives that do fail typically fail within three years, no drive is completely immune, and over time, generally, all drives wear out. google servers drive data 2007 showed that HDD failures were mostly unpredictable, and temperature was not really a deciding factor.

So Iron Mountain’s warning to music companies is another warning we’ve already heard. But it’s always good to know just how fragile a good collection really is.

This story was originally published here Ars Technica,