Comment by tw04
1 day ago
And yet, there’s a reason we use magnetic tape for long term archive and it’s not because usb drives are reliable.
Without having details on the specific floppy disks in question there’s no way you can authoritatively say they are unreliable. They absolutely produced floppy disks that were far more reliable than the ones sourced from the cheapest vendor possible some of us used in school back in the day. Ignoring the fact I’m guessing the disks in question aren’t having to survive life in a students backpack.
Ohhh, don't compare magnetic backup tapes to floppy. Same designs underneath but completely different storage shell, delivery mechanism, even the coating is different.
One cost $100 another $1.
Then these tapes are typically write once read many.
They were designed to deal with floppy disk flaws consumers deal with.
Actually really cool to read about modern tape systems.
I had a customer with a slightly dusty office and we simply gave up on tape drives as a backup storage medium because we were replacing the drives or tapes on a monthly basis.
We switched them over to external USB enclosures with cheap SATA drives in them and never looked back.
> And yet, there’s a reason we use magnetic tape for long term archive
Is it because "long-term archival" strategies aren't updated frequently?
It's because magnetic storage where the drive bearings are separated from the media can be expected to sit on properly temperature controlled shelf for 50 years with next to no bit rot, in contrast to flash.
Magnetic storage system are pretty cool, barium ferrite magnetic tapes being coated on them is interesting too