One example a trend does not make. It is very very rare for such an occurance and I'll bet there is such examples of media failure for every media under the sun.

Sony has done accelerated environmental testing on the Professional Disc in their labs. This is where the 50 year archival number comes from. Keep in mind, Professional Disc is not the same as Blu-Ray, only based on it. PD has a lower capacity for better data integrity and is fully enclosed which protects the disc.

The other aspect of the HDD solution is that if you do put the equivalent of several PD's onto a single hard drive and it does happen to fail, you're losing a lot more. Not always a good idea to have all your eggs in one basket.

There's a lot more that 'can' go wrong with an HD sitting on the shelf for years in the electro/mechanical sense. The PD, on the other hand, is nothing more than a disc in a protective shell. No electrical parts, and very little in the way of mechanics.

My thoughts are that none of these media storage solutions will be in actual use for that long. The stuff will get moved to newer media at some point if it's really important.

-gb-

There is accelerated testing and then there is reality. Hard drives undergo accelerated testing to come up with the MTBF yet they seem to fail in a much shorter time frame. Inkjet printers use accelerated testing to claim their fade resistance, yet we all know how accurate those results are...

When HDDs fail it is normally an electronic failure, not magnetic. If the data is worth it, there are certainly data recovery services around to do the job.

On the capacity, yes it is more eggs in one basket, but in your case there is much more chance of having one of many baskets fail. Smaller loss, but much more chance of it happening.

There are many things that can kill a hard drive. Damp can destroy the platters and electronics, cause bearings to fail or seize. Static electricity can destroy the electronics, shock can damage the heads or platters. Over voltage can wreck the whole drive. Over the years I have had at least a dozen hard drive failures, I wouldn't trust my valuable material to a single hard drive with no backup. If hard drives were truly reliable there wouldn't be so many redundant raid array options or companies making large amounts of money for data recovery.

The difference, and there is a big difference, is you are talking about drives in use, often very heavy contineous use. I am sure if you had your XDCAM media in your drive and you were reading and writing to it all the time it would fail a lot quicker than your HDDs have (and the reader would fail even faster). The polycarbonate of the disk would likely just disintegrate with the stress from spinning up and down (and around) much quicker than you would like this imagine it would.

Yup, I had a drive develop a nice little banging/rattling sound after leaving it sitting for a few years. Thankfully I was able to do a low level copy and retrieve everything from it, but it is a definite possiblity.

Eric

I never denied it was a possibility, just unlikley. I often fire up old HDDs and never have had any problems.

I used to think hard drives only crashed for other people. Since 1996, I've had at least 10, maybe 12 drives go bad in various ways, from grinding, rattling, squeaking to just plain motor and circuit board failure.

It's the same as car accidents.. You've never been in one til it happens to you. Then you are glad you had your seatbelt on, etc, etc.

Hard drives are no fun at all sometimes :(

Eric

I think this thread has just about run its course. Obviously, some folks are very happy using HD as an archival media, while others prefer something different. Everyone should use whatever makes them feel comfortable.

-gb-