On Thu, 17 Oct 2002 20:07:29 -0400 Jeff Moore (jbm@jbm.org) wrote:
> Funny how the name Maxell keeps coming up in the context of unreliable
> media. The only brand of floppy disk I avoided like the plague,
> because it was the only brand which lost data repeatedly, was Maxell
> (the ones with the black plastic slider thingie).
Hmm. I bought 100 expensive Sony floppies about 5yrs ago, thinking they'd
be good. After <2yrs, 90% had errors and bad sectors and were junk. The
3M's I had bought a year or so before were still fine, and still are, as
are a motley collection of Verbatim and no-name brands.
As for DAT (Dies After Two years) tape... if there is a more fragile,
unreliable and unrestoreable medium I have yet to meet it (but then I have
admittedly never used Syquest or Jazz:). *Any* brand. The drives are no
better, I am on my 3rd (Python, Seagate, Sony) and hardly dare use it. It
seemed daft to entrust system backups to something far flakier than hard
disc, so now I use them.
Mind you, I think they are worse now due to commodity pricing and high spin
speeds - 5 dead in 2yrs each <3yrs old (Maxtor, Seagate, WD, Hitachi,
Toshiba), and 1 newish IBM currently growing an occasional bad sector...
I have never yet had any CDR go bad, after 6 years of storage, and the
only time I've had a burn failure it has been my own silly fault.
DVDR seems to be rated at 3-4yrs max at present. Hmm.
Regards
Tony Sleep -
Online portfolio & exhibit + film scanner info & comparisons
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