Music Archivists Are Worried About Hard Drives From the ‘90s Becoming Unreadable
Standard hard drives were not built to last for long-term storage, causing old sessions to be lost to time.
The hard drives that hold generations of albums from the music industry are increasingly becoming unreadable and potentially wiping out a portion of music history.
Earlier this week, Mix published an article highlighting Iron Mountain, a company that handles the media industry's archives stored in vaults. According to the story, about one-fifth of the hard disk drives storing content from the 1990s are no longer readable.
The reason hard drives no longer function is that most of the standard models were not designed for long-term storage. When a company receives a hard drive, one of its main concerns is the spinning disk platter inside the drive, which tells it if it can access its contents.
According to the report, musicians and studios looking to remaster their old content often find their drives unrecoverable even if they were properly stored under the right conditions.
“It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,” said Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain. “Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”
The issue has already hit major companies such as backup company Backblaze who shared failure data that showed that failing hard drives fail within three years.
