Re: <nettime> Dead Media Working Note 32.4

["David S. Bennahum" <davidsol@panix.com>]

>     "Forget forever. Under less-than-optimal storage
>conditions, digital tapes and disks, including CD-ROMs and
>optical drives, might deteriorate about as fast as
>newsprint == in 5 to 10 years. Tests by the National Media
>Lab, a St. Paul (Minn.)-based government and industry
>consortium, show that tapes might preserve data for a
>decade, depending on storage conditions. Disks == whether
>CD-ROMs used for games or the type used by some companies
>to store pension plans == may become unreadable in five
>years.

Interesting-- I have approximately 65 floppy disks (5-1/4 inch) containing
approximately 350 programs which I aquired between 1981-1985 for my Atari
800 with 48K of RAM.  I have the original machine, which works fine, the
original floppy drives, which work fine, and, as of this year, all the
programs and data files are uncorrupted. All of them.

In other words, my digital media has lasted 17 to 12 years without any
failure. It was stored in an uncooled location (a warehouse in Queens, NY)
where temparatures vary from below freezing to about 100F (40C) every year.
I took it out of storage in 1996 (it was there from 1986-1996).

All I can make of this is to wonder who comes up with these statistics
about five years of decay. With 100% preservation success (unintended),
this seems to fall outside statistcal variance for the 5 year hypothesis.

Who makes this stuff up?

/d

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

David Bennahum wrote: 

> All I can make of this is to wonder who comes up with these statistics
> about five years of decay. With 100% preservation success (unintended),
> this seems to fall outside statistcal variance for the 5 year hypothesis.
>
> Who makes this stuff up?

Of the less-than-mint machines I have or have had access to recently:

   - Osborne  1: drives work, ~50%  of disks work
   - Apple IIGS: drive works, ~100% of disks work
   - IBM Personal Portable Computer: drives work, no disks available
   - IBM XT: original 5.25 floppy works, ~75% disks work
           : original HD dead, replacement ('89) works
           : later 3.5 drive dead, ~90% disks work
   - Apple IIci: floppy works, no disks available disks
   - SyQuest 88: drive works, disks work
   - Ricoh cartridge: drive works, ~75% disks work
   - Apple 7100: floppy dead, CD dead, HD works
   - Exabyte: drive works, 90% tapes work
   - Zip (~2+ yrs old): drive works, all disks work
   - Jaz: I've had 4 internal drives but no external drives die in
     1.5 years; ~75% of the disks have survived initial use
   - no CDs have dies yet, but ~5% of music are DOA

None of this corresponds to usage or storage conditions, AFAICT,
though as margins-for-error for removable media shrink, failure
rates increase (duh). I know sysadmins who are *intensely* picky
about the brand, model, and even production-run of the hard drives
they buy.

None of this pseudo-quantitative info answers your basic question 
about who makes this stuff up. That, I think, derives mostly from 
anxieties about the instabilities introduced by digital media,
which range from manipulability and transformation to a habitual
preference for the failures of "analog" media (second-generation
photocopies are "OK") over the corresponding quirks of digital 
media (dumps from half-failed media aren't "OK"). But I will say
that while I've never had a record collection die on me, I *have*
had a hard drive die on me--and no amount of cultural criticism
makes up for it.

Ted
---
#  distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/  contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl