Archiving Projects-- TAPE vs. DVD

[Ross Werner]

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006, "Gregory Hill" wrote:
> I had a hard drive with a 3 year warranty that I used for probably 2
> years and let sit on the shelf for 5 or so.  Picked it up one day,
> plugged it in, and everything was still there.  Drive still worked
> great.  Maybe that's abnormal, but I thought it was worth sharing.

I've never had problems with a hard drive that had been sitting unused for 
years. If it's used constantly for years, I can see it getting old and 
wearing out, but I've never seen a problem with a drive that hadn't been 
used for years.

(It's probably worthwhile to note that the opposite has been true with 
optical media; a signficant percentage of the writable optical media that 
I've used that had been sitting around unused for years has gone at least 
partially bad.)

 	~ Ross