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**SantaClaus** · 06-02-2008, 08:45 PM

Originally posted by Asher

It's trivial to transfer and expand/upgrade external HDDs every ~5 years. 5 years is more than the safe lifetime of a HDD, unfortunately... a CD is still by far the safest, because once verified as properly written (which is the largest failure point), a CD will be very secure in its functionality for 8 to 10 years; probably less than 1% failure rate over that period of time. There were some interesting articles about that I read a while back, probably on the fora somewhere (about the 50 year lifetime and how it was being tested now by the LoC and others). Can't recall where, though.

HDDs have a (relatively) high short-term failure rate - I'd estimate 10% within 2 years, if I had to guess (sure there are stats out there somewhere). Obviously a RAID array is (much) safer, though i'm not sure if it becomes as safe as a CD; but it is twice as expensive.

I'd still recommend a HDD for any non-critical backup, don't get me wrong, but for critical backups HDD is not good enough.

06-02-2008, 08:45 PM	#17
SantaClaus Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 704 Senior Member	Originally posted by Asher It's trivial to transfer and expand/upgrade external HDDs every ~5 years. 5 years is more than the safe lifetime of a HDD, unfortunately... a CD is still by far the safest, because once verified as properly written (which is the largest failure point), a CD will be very secure in its functionality for 8 to 10 years; probably less than 1% failure rate over that period of time. There were some interesting articles about that I read a while back, probably on the fora somewhere (about the 50 year lifetime and how it was being tested now by the LoC and others). Can't recall where, though. HDDs have a (relatively) high short-term failure rate - I'd estimate 10% within 2 years, if I had to guess (sure there are stats out there somewhere). Obviously a RAID array is (much) safer, though i'm not sure if it becomes as safe as a CD; but it is twice as expensive. I'd still recommend a HDD for any non-critical backup, don't get me wrong, but for critical backups HDD is not good enough.
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