[Coco] Sigh of relief, refresh your floppies!

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 26 March 2010, Stephen H. Fischer wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I just got done reading ~ 200 floppies using OS9 and Retrieve, only one
> disk had a problem. They were written ~ 2001 when I made 3.5" copies of
> all the 5-1/4" disks. A very good move. Now to burn them to CD where they
> will be safe.
>
>Today I have many disks that I expect are not readable today, but I have
> no desire to read those disks.
>
>So, refresh your floppies!
>
>Question: Do hard disks need to be low level formatted after many years.
>Don't they have the same problem as floppies?
>
They claim not.  But personal experience says that they do tend to suffer 
from a phenom called multipass erasure, and actually at about the same rate 
as a video tape does.  In our commercial servers at the tv station, where we 
had largely switched to mpeg playbacks from 10k rpm scsi drives about 12 
years ago, we found that we needed to burn a copy of the finished commercial 
to cd, and carefully index and catalog then for easy retrieval should the 
hard drive copy go flaky.  And it did, sometimes in as little as 50 plays.  
Recopy right over the failing file from the cd and it was good for another 
2-6 weeks.  And when we got tired of paying $400 for an 8GB scsi-2 drives 
that lasted 90 days & swapped it out for 100+ Gb ata drives that would run 
for a year or more, that fade effect remained.  Now we have 1Tb drives for 
$90 at Staples, and I haven't had that effect me here unless the drive was 
about to sign off for good.  But we're still backing up the commercials on 
optical media, the conversion to hi-def didn't negate that need.

FWIW, it takes about $20,000 in fauncy machinery to actually do a low level 
format on todays hard drives, they lost that ability at about the same time 
scsi-2 came on the scene.

>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-----
>
>In the spirit of "9)":
>
>... Seriously, if you have some source code that you know could be
> valuable to the community and its stuck on a hard drive in Timbuktu, get
> it out and at least ship it to someone who can extract it.
>
>Are "someone" in Zamboanga?
>
>I discovered that they are not both in Africa as
>I thought growing up listening to WGN late at night (The Torch Hour) where
>"Franklyn MacCormack - Vagabond's House" was my favorite and I heard the
>names of these two places first.
>
>Franklyn MacCormack, Chicago Radio Personality
>http://nwfolk.com/franklyn.html
>
>Note: There is a Timbuktu in California, I have been there. The
> California's Gold episode is about to be shown again.
>
>-----------------------------------------
>
>I have discovered several things I did not remember I had that might be of
>interest to the group but need some work that I do not time to do.
>
>Please respond to help if you can.
>
>SHF
>
>
>--
>Coco mailing list
>Coco at maltedmedia.com
>http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>


-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
		-- Thomas Alva Edison