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Comment by mk_stjames

Even if perfectly held still in a sealed box with perfect conditions, hard disk drives need controllers; they need the chipset to drive them, which has ROM and other stored microcode that is susceptible to bit flips due to cosmic ray impingement. I've traced faults in a few 20+ year old HDD's due to failed controllers likely due to such loss (either in the main controller fail, a ROM/BIOS chip fail, or less likely but still possible the cache IC, or motor controller). The data is there on the spinning rust, you just won't have a way to access it.

The failure of SSD's you warn of and the way the HDD's fail due to a dead controller aren't that different.

This won't happen with a physically written media like a CD, DVD, or Blu Ray disc. With physical media, you're separating out the media from the reader (the drive). If your disc reader dies or you cant find it, etc, you can go find any another one on ebay even decades from now, very likely.

Doing surgery on an HDD controller PCB to replace a dead controller, while possible, sucks, and may be incredibly difficult if not impossible to source parts for in the future.

parent mk_stjames 27 days ago

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