Music Industry's 1990s Hard Drives Are Dying (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0174984385
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/09/12/1957219/music-industrys-1990s-hard-drives-are-dying
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/music-industrys-1990s-hard-drives-like-all-hdds-are-dying/
> One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: [1]roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable . Music industry publication Mix [2]spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone's data stored on spinning disks. "In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know," Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. "It may sound like a sales pitch, but it's not; it's a call for action."
>
> Hard drives gained popularity over spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived downsides of tape, including deterioration from substrate separation and fire. But hard drives present their own archival problems. Standard hard drives were also not designed for long-term archival use. You can almost never decouple the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside, so that if either fails, the whole drive dies. There are also general computer storage issues, including the separation of samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats requiring archival versions of software. Still, Iron Mountain tells Mix that "If the disk platters spin and aren't damaged," it can access the content.
>
> But "if it spins" is becoming a big question mark. Musicians and studios now digging into their archives to remaster tracks often find that drives, even when stored at industry-standard temperature and humidity, have failed in some way, with no partial recovery option available. "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," Koszela says. "Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything's in order. And both of them are bricks."
"Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.," [3]writes Hacker News user abracadaniel in [4]a discussion post about the article. "Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you'd expect."
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/music-industrys-1990s-hard-drives-like-all-hdds-are-dying/
[2] https://www.mixonline.com/business/inside-iron-mountain-its-time-to-talk-about-hard-drives
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505547
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41504331
Micromachines have very little scrap value (Score:5, Funny)
Hard to believe that a nanoscopic clump of iron oxide molecules can't hold an infinitesimal magnetic charge for eternity, even after we did all those decades of development to ensure that there's as little redundancy as possible.
It may be an unpopular opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm tired of all the endless "remastering" anyway. Seems like every time a song gets remastered it just amounts to boosting the bass and applying even more dynamic range compression than they did the last time around. If we're stuck with what was released on CDs to the general public because the masters are gone, well, no great loss. We're not talking scratchy shellac phonographs, so it's not as if people in the future will have to hear some old-timey sounding version of Taylor Swift a century from now.
Heck, by then AI will probably have progressed to the point where you could just ask it to sing whatever song you want as Taylor Swift and the rendition would be absolutely perfect.
Re: (Score:3)
> I'm tired of all the endless "remastering" anyway. Seems like every time a song gets remastered it just amounts to boosting the bass and applying even more dynamic range compression than they did the last time around. If we're stuck with what was released on CDs to the general public because the masters are gone, well, no great loss. We're not talking scratchy shellac phonographs, so it's not as if people in the future will have to hear some old-timey sounding version of Taylor Swift a century from now.
> Heck, by then AI will probably have progressed to the point where you could just ask it to sing whatever song you want as Taylor Swift and the rendition would be absolutely perfect.
Most remasters are pretty meh. Some are atrocious. The metal bands are notorious for this. Megadeth's remasters are clearly influenced by 40+ years of loud stages. All the frequencies on the top and bottom that you start losing from all those years at stage volume are boosted while the mids where most of us would prefer the focus to be tend to be dampened. Not to mention the modern loudness nonsense. Leave a little air in a mix and it's beautiful. Smash it into a brick wall and it sounds pretty much like it
Re: (Score:2)
> All the frequencies on the top and bottom that you start losing from all those years at stage volume are boosted while the mids where most of us would prefer the focus to be tend to be dampened.
People on average perceive a V shaped sound profile as sounding better so I could see a rando doing this, but you'd expect the pros to have a bit more restraint.
They don't remaster to make 'em sound better (Score:2)
it's usually to remove studio musicians or ex-bandmates who are due royalties for the performances. That's why all the old Ozzy records got remastered and don't sound as good.
Re: (Score:2)
Who'd they remove from old Ozzy records? like Bark At The Moon etc? FWIW, Black Sabbath songs sound great until Ozzy starts singing. He is no musician.
Re: (Score:2)
You are mistaken, that is not what remastering means. Remastering (just like the original mastering process) only has access to the full stereo mix of the recording (notwithstanding the Dolby Atmos 3D mix nonsense newer productions are mixed down to), so there is no way of getting rid of part of the recording. It's really just putting the final touches on a recording. What you are confusing this with is rerecording of older tracks and even whole albums, like Taylor Swift did to reclaim her royalties.
Dis
Steven Wilson prog remasters (Score:2)
In most cases I agree with you, but I have to call out the incredible job [1]Steven Wilson [wikipedia.org] (Porcupine Tree, No-Man, Blackfield) has done remastering prog favorites.
The man takes the original stems and does a complete remix. Philosophically, he's not trying to make an album something different from what it was, but instead to open it up, make it clearer.
I have a couple of his remasters: King Crimson "Red", and Yes "Close to the Edge". In the case of the former, he felt the main mix couldn't be bettered and left
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Wilson
Re: (Score:2)
I actually find when I listen to older music it doesn't seem as loud, and that might just be because it's been REMASTERED to be played at a louder volume.
At any rate No, AI will never get to that point. The best you can do right now is RVC and what that effectively lets you do is "remaster" the vocal track using someone else's singing and someone elses voice.
Eg "Sing Umbrella by Rihanna, with the voice of Kyary Pamyu." The result would sound like Kyary Pamyu, but still have the singing style of Rihanna. A l
Wide-Area Distributed backups (Score:2)
Just ask everyone on the Internet for the backup copies of multimedia that they have stored locally. I bet there's at least one copy of everything somewhere. /void where prohibited.
Re: (Score:3)
My thought exactly, just give away free copies and you get infinite backups for free.
Re: Wide-Area Distributed backups (Score:4, Funny)
This already exists; it's called BitTorrent, and it's your Friend.
Re: (Score:2)
We should actually go back to something more like Napster/Kazaa/Soulseek where it's normal to just share everything you have, rather than just the few torrents you recently downloaded.
Stored Winchester drives as backup? (Score:3)
That's just silly. These things are mechanical and surprisingly frail. They depend on lubrication and stable mounting. Rarely do the MFM drives of the 1980s work for me when I try to resurrect one. Sometimes. But why should you expect the ATA drives of the 1990s and beyond to be any better?
Old tape cartridges are much better. I have perfectly readable DC2000 tapes from the late 80s/early 90s.
Re: (Score:2)
They should change how the hard-drives are read. Remove the cover and extract the disk. Then scan it on a slow-read turn-table, kind of like a vinyl record. Then you don't get violent head crashes and the like. It takes longer, but gives more options.
Re: (Score:2)
Any competent data recovery service can recover drives in the state discussed, probably at 100%.
But bring your check book.
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds like utter incompetence, but maybe they did not actually want to archive anything and were happy just taking the money for it.
Good? (Score:1)
Sometimes wonder if storing all this data about our past is a good thing? One example, in the future if people become vegan .. they may look at us who eat meat the same way people think of slave owners. Proven descendants of people who used to eat meat would get discriminated against, meanwhile the people who have no records of what their ancestors were like will proclaim all their ancestors were vegan.
Re: (Score:2)
Another thing. It's possible to put stuff you know in the future can be used against someone because it'll be in the data .. sort of like blackmail.
Re: (Score:2)
> Sometimes wonder if storing all this data about our past is a good thing? One example, in the future if people become vegan .. they may look at us who eat meat the same way people think of slave owners.
Are you suggesting that future generations are going to be judging our society based on disco or something? "Your ancestors listened to the Bee Gees, they were monsters!"
Re: (Score:2)
> in the future if people become vegan .. they may look at us who eat meat the same way people think of slave owners. Proven descendants of people who used to eat meat would get discriminated against, meanwhile the people who have no records of what their ancestors were like will proclaim all their ancestors were vegan.
You win for most random comment lmao.
Re: (Score:1)
So, I've got a bit of practical experience with this, and uh... it would sound crazy if I said why or how, so we'll just leave that part out. What I can tell you for sure though is that in the future they'll look least kindly on the periods who either purposefully destroyed or failed to preserve their own history for posterity, and they'll look most kindly on the periods where the most data was preserved, even if lots of it would have seemed unnecessary or frivolous at the time. By and large, ethical differ
More backups? (Score:3)
I know the article says there is the master then the backup, and both can be bad, but shouldn't there be at least one other copy somewhere else offsite in case something happens to these two? I know it sounds like turtles all the way down, but multiple copies in disparate locations would give a better chance of having a copy in case something happens to the others.
This does bring up the issue of security, but at the very least you've enhanced the survivability of getting data.
Also, even if the drive doesn't spin, aren't there recovery services which disassemble the drive and read from the platters?
So, what is the state of the art? (Score:2)
...for archival storage?
Re: (Score:1)
Hopefully it's at least as good as [1]this [nasa.gov]. :)
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-record-overview/
Carving it in Stone (Score:2)
It depends. If longevity is your only concern then carving it in stone, preferably something hard like granite, is probably still state of the art but the storage time and data capacity is not great. Parchment and vellum with the right inks and storage conditions last pretty well too. Most modern media have far better capacities and write times but rely on small clusters of atoms that make them susceptible to thermodynamic fluctuations and/or cosmic rays/radioactivity over decade plus timescales.
Re: (Score:2)
For music? That would be vinyl.
Re: (Score:2)
Magnetic tape lasts decades but there are specific formulas of tape that are now failing. If stored properly tapes from the 1960s are still readable.
Re: (Score:2)
Simple
1.) Archival grade tape that comes with assurances
2.) Spinning disks with regular checks, redundancy and automated re-duplication
3.) Paper (I wish I was kidding).
Option 3. is suitable for example for CA master certificates and other critical low-volume data. Of course you need high-quality laser print or pigmented (non-fading) ink.
There used to be
4.) MOD (Magneto Optical Disks), but the market died because people are too cheap.
Idiotic (Score:2)
A company like Iron Mountain should know hard drives, even in optimal conditions, don't last for more than a few years if not in use. Some of the drives will be recoverable, but only at great expense.
The current best practice for long-term data storage is to transfer to actual archival-quality formats, then re-transfer every decade or so. This avoids rot. (If it were actually archival quality, maybe even longer gaps.)
Once the (practically mythological) storage on crystal is mastered, then archive to that. B
storage on crystal (Score:1)
How long do the laser-engraved serial numbers on diamonds last? I would expect centuries, probably many times longer.
Too bad their bit density is way too low to be competitive with disks/tapes/solid-state media.
Re: (Score:2)
There is no market for any archival-grade media except archival tape. MODs used to have 50 years assured data lifetime and one Phillips development engineer I talked to said that they were pretty confident for 80 years, and after that the accelerated ageing models broke down, so they did not actually know. I had several MOD drives, very convenient, and the one read failure I had I fixed with blowing dust away with compressed air. But the market was not there, so development stalled and eventually production
Re: (Score:2)
Iron Mountain is just the archive service. The studios own the drives.
Live backups (Score:2)
Offline archives have their place, but to really *know* your data is secured, you need active storage methods. This obviously introduces significant overhead for the long term storage and retention of data, but in cases like this...isn't it kind of worth it?
It's not like we don't know how to do this; backblaze and other online backup companies solved this problem a long time ago. Perhaps it just needs a little tweaking to meet industry specific requirements ( I could see the need for airgapping the backups
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. Archival-grade tape, can reliably be read for its advertised lifetime if stored properly and you have long-term availability of drives. You are correct that the only other reasonable option at this time is permanently checked online storage. It is not more reliable that archival media though, they are roughly on equal footing. What counts in the end is your data retrieval profile and other factors besides reliability.
morons (Score:2)
Absolutely nothing here is unique to the recording industry, and much of it isn't unique to the particular media either. It's not clear who they intend to deceive with this bullshit, but it's clearly just a grift.
Idiot-Led Effort (Score:2)
Tape was designed for archival use, and there is even a special long-term archival variant. The LTO format is backward-compatible at least two generations according to the spec, and often more than that in practice.
Instead of dealing with a slightly slow yet highly reliable technology, they chose something quick and cheap. Anyone with archival experience could have told them it was a bad idea, and I strongly suspect they were told repeatedly.
Corporate execs aren't that brilliant. They deserve neither unchec
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. This is a massive screw-up and the people that chose this solution are 100% at fault. Any actual data archival expert would immediately have told them that this approach does not work.
U2 was way ahead on this (Score:3)
Funny enough, it was almost exactly 10 years when U2 decided to backup one of their albums onto everyone's iPhone. Making lots of copies everywhere seems like a great solution.
[1]https://www.stereogum.com/2279... [stereogum.com]
[1] https://www.stereogum.com/2279219/u2-songs-of-innocence-apple-iphones/columns/sounding-board/
Re: (Score:2)
U2 on iPhones was really 10 years ago? [1]Flappy bird [slashdot.org] 10 years ago? It seems like Slashdot is dedicated to making me feel old today!
[1] https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/09/12/1529222/10-years-after-it-was-pulled-offline-viral-mobile-game-flappy-bird-is-coming-back
Effectively permanent solution (Score:2)
Etch your audio into a quartzite disk as if it were a vinyl record. Excluding gross mechanical damage, it will remain playable until the planet is melted by the expanding Sun. Longer if you ship it beyond Mars' orbit.
Not just the music industry (Score:2)
My father worked as a "sensitivity reviewer" for a UK government records office in his retirement after he left the diplomatic service. The stuff he was releasing was from mostly 50 years years ago when it was statutorily made public as long as it didn't deal with anyone alive (or members of the royal family - thanks Tony Blair!). He said he'd heard that there was a "black hole" coming down the line from the period in 90's when departments moved to email and digital storage. People in about 2010 trying to g
just revive piratebay (Score:2)
and let everyone keep a backup copy
If it spins ... (Score:2)
> But "if it spins" is becoming a big question mark.
One of my PCs in the late 90's ran Windows NT 4.0 and had a 5GB F/W SCSI hard drive (and SCSI CD-ROM), it ran 24/7 for over 5 years, then sat around in a box for 5 years. Before I finally got rid of it I wanted to double check if there was anything to copy off. The drive wouldn't spin up, and just made regular soft clicking sounds, so I rapped the side of it with a screwdriver handle and it then slowly came up to speed. I let it idle for a while then browsed the drive, all the data was fine. Luck? Pro
Re: (Score:2)
Not luck, it is well known that the lubricant in the bearings thicken up to the point the motor is unable to get it spinning without help. Usually it involves some light vibration as you did or sticking it in a freezer to make the lubricant shrink and fragment.
Re: (Score:2)
> Not luck, it is well known that the lubricant in the bearings thicken up to the point the motor is unable to get it spinning without help. Usually it involves some light vibration as you did or sticking it in a freezer to make the lubricant shrink and fragment.
Interesting I had success with the opposite approach by putting heat energy into the drive. Instead of vibrating the drives I'd use an oven to warm up an old drive and that would often overcome the [1]Stiction [wikipedia.org] that stops the disk from spinning.
What I do for stuff I've recorded and mastered is regularly transfer stuff off older drives which is better than putting drives in ovens to recover data whilst reducing the physical storage space required. I'm a little surprised that Iron Mountain don't already do t
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction
They archive things on non-spinning HDDs? (Score:2)
How incompetent can you be? That this does not work has been clear, basically forever. Who are these jokers?
Your choices essentially are 1) archive-grade tape with actual verified assurances on how long they keep data and 2) archive on spinning disks and do regular checks and have enough redundancy and fault-tolerance. There used to be 3) use MODs, but nobody cared enough for an affordable archival-grade medium with >50 years data life expectancy.
When have hard disks EVER been archival grade? (Score:2)
Pardon the word capitalization, but when have hard disks been ever considered something of an archival grade medium. At best, it is something to take offsite for 3-2-1-1-0 (three copies, two on different media, one offsite, one offline, zero errors) backups, in a grandfather-father-son rotation.
The problem we have had in the past decade is the fact that tape has become so much more expensive than hard disks. It used to be that one could buy a tape drive for a few hundred dollars, or a really good SCSI one
Dual backup (Score:2)
and you don't have to worry as much.
Re:Dual backup (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't gain much if it's all the same age. If it all reaches its end of life, they can easily all be gone.
They only solution is a dynamic backup. One where you recopy it fresh to new media periodically.
Re:Dual backup (Score:5, Insightful)
The music industry should understand the need to keep copying old things to new media. It's half their business model.
Re: (Score:2)
Just store the masters in a building that can catch on fire.
Re: (Score:2)
The article literally says frequently the backup (safety drive) is also unreadable.
Re: (Score:3)
That is why you have to test your backups on a regular basis.
The problem here isn't the medium, it's the people handling the archives (or the people above them refusing to give them the resources to do it right.)
Re: (Score:2)
Testing of tens of thousands of drives regularly is a massive undertaking. At some point the expense outweighs the benefits. That's the entire point of the article. If they didn't have to worry about that bit, they could simply back it all up to multiple redundancy settings with numerous means of archiving in different locations and not have this issue. But again, managing and cost is a real consideration at this type of scale.
Re: (Score:2)
> Testing of tens of thousands of drives regularly is a massive undertaking.
You don't test tens of thousands. You test ONE drive.
In the 1990s, a one-gigabyte HDD was state-of-the-art.
Today, I can buy a 10-terabyte HDD on Amazon for $100.
So copy the 10,000 1-GB drives onto a single 10-TB HDD, and your job becomes much easier.
> That's the entire point of the article.
Yes, but it's a stupid point. The very first lesson of archiving is to periodically upgrade to new media.
They failed to do that and are now blaming their incompetence on "entropy".
Re: (Score:2)
That's not at all how this archiving works. You clearly didn't read the article. These are the original masters. They can't simply take what's on the old hard drive and copy it to a new one. They can't take all the drives from the recording of Artist A album 1 and throw it on a drive with Artist K album 26. If it were that simple, they'd just throw it all on some cloud backup and you wouldn't see this article to begin with.
As the article also discusses, they can't simply take and convert everything to a mod
Re: (Score:2)
> They can't simply take what's on the old hard drive and copy it to a new one.
1. TFA doesn't say that. If you think it does, please cite the relevant text.
2. There is no technical reason you can't copy from one HDD to another. It is all digital.
> They can't take all the drives from the recording of Artist A album 1 and throw it on a drive with Artist K album 26.
Why not? TFA doesn't mention any legal barriers, and there are no technical barriers.
> they can't simply take and convert everything to a modern format
Copying a file doesn't require "converting" the format. You just copy it.
> You don't just take a simple photo of the Mona Lisa with your smartphone, upload it to Google Drive and claim the backup problem is solved.
That's a silly analogy.
Taking a photo of a painting is a lossy analog to digital process.
Copying a file from one HDD to another is a digital-to-digital process. The new file is an exact c
Re: (Score:2)
This is the universe telling them their copyright is expired. Couldn't happen to be a better lot.
Rule of Thumb (Score:2)
I've always heard, rule of thumb, is that you have three copies of your data. An active, copy, a backup, and another backup.
How much are all those thousands of hours of recordings worth? For around a quarter million dollars you can buy a Dell StorageVault with 2PB of space, enough for millions of hours of high res audio, or billions of hours of CD quality audio. Run ZFS on it, then you set up two more in different locations as backups. You leave everything turned on and scrub everything once a month.
It will
Re: (Score:2)
Way to miss the point.
The drives with the MEDIA, and THE SOFTWARE (which could include applications, licenses, operating system, firmware, etc) become useless.
This has pretty much been the problem since computers moved from tapes and hard drives the size of warehouses. It may be cheap to keep making backups of backups, but who is verifying that that backup can be read? What if it's destroyed by fire? What if it's destroyed because the license to the hardware or software used to play it can't phone home, bec