Dave U. Random wrote:
> Are you sure that you will be able to plug that 10-year old HD
> in your future computer?
Either through the SATA cable, HD dock or external HD case.... Yes. And
assuming that, somehow, the original hardware that you used with that HD
mysteriously vanished.
> Once popular buses, connectors, protocols, even
> sockets for external units, tend to get replaced after a decade.
USB is still going strong, although it was introduced in 1996. Parallel
ATA was introduced in 1986 and you can still buy motherboards which
support it. Serial ATA was introduced in 2003 and it won't go away for a
long, long time. So, I expect this issue to be covered.
> IMO, HDs are fine for archiving data, if you update your archives
> every 6 years or so, using disks of newer technology.
The deskop I work on has a single HD which I salvaged from a previous
desktop I owned, which was built around a AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor.
That makes the HD to be around 8 or 9 years old. I've been using it
practically every single day since I've bought it. So, if a HD takes up
that level of beating without exhibiting a single problem then I believe
it is safe to assume that it's possible to use HDs to backup data for
periods over 6 years. And this without adding RAID to the mix.
Rui Maciel
