The Hard Drive of the 90s Music Industry Is Dying

One of the things that storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the storage of media industry archives. What the company recently saw might be a wake-up call: About a fifth of the 1990s-era hard drives it sent out were completely unreadable.

Music Industry Magazine Mix spoke to the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting story is part explanation of why music is so complicated to archive these days, part warning about people’s data being stored on spinning discs.

“In our line of work, if we find an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let people know,” Robert Koszela, global head of studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. “It sounds like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call to action.”

Hard drives became more popular than reel-to-reel tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived disadvantages of tape, including degradation due to substrate separation and flame. But hard drives have their own storage problems. Standard hard drives aren’t designed for long-term storage use, either. You can almost never separate the platters from the internal reading hardware, so if one fails, the whole drive dies.

There are also general computer storage issues, including the separation of samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats that require archival software versions. However, Iron Mountain told Mix that “if the discs are spinning and not broken,” it can access the content.

But “if it spins” is becoming a big question mark. Musicians and studios now digging through their archives to remaster tracks often find that the drives, even when stored at industry-standard temperatures and humidity levels, have somehow been damaged, with no option for partial recovery.

“It’s sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand new box with the wrapping and label from where they bought it still there,” Koszela said. “Next to it is a box with a safe drive inside. Everything is fine. And both are bricks.”

Entropy wins

Mix conveys Iron Mountain’s warning appeared on Hacker News earlier this weekThis has fueled other stories about faith in false formats. The gist of it is: You can’t trust any medium, so you copy important stuff over and over, onto new storage. “Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, drives get stuck, flash storage loses charge, etc.” write user abracadaniel. “Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you expect.”

There is discussion about how SSDs do not have storage functions; Floppy disk quality varied greatly between the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; Linear Tape-Open, a format specifically designed for long-term tape storage, loss of compatibility over subsequent generations; the way our CD-R and DVD-R covers are used has caused them to bend so much that they are unreadable.

Knowing that hard drives eventually fail is nothing new. Ars has written about Five Stages of Hard Drive Deathincluding denials, in 2005. Last year, the company backed up Backblaze Shares Failure Data on Specific Drivesshows that failed drives tend to fail within three years, no drive is completely immune, and time generally wears out all drives. Google Server Drive Data pointed out in 2007 that hard drive failure is largely unpredictable and temperature is not really a determining factor.

So Iron Mountain’s warning to music companies is another one of the things we’ve heard before. But it’s always good to have some new data on how fragile a good archive really is.

This story originally appeared on Ars Engineering.