The hard drives of the 1990s music industry, like all HDDs, are dying

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is archive the vaults of the media industry. What it has seen lately should be a wake-up call: About a fifth of the hard drives it has received dating back to the 1990s are completely unreadable.

Music industry publication Mix spoke to the people responsible for backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting story is part explanation of how music has become so complicated to archive, part warning about everyone’s data stored on spinning disks.

“If we find an inherent problem with a format in our work, it makes sense to let everyone know,” Robert Koszela, global director of 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 to action.”

Hard drives gained popularity over spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived disadvantages of tape, including degradation due to substrate separation and burning. But hard drives bring their own archival problems. Standard hard drives are also not designed for long-term archival use. You can almost never separate the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside them, so if one fails, the entire drive dies.

There are also common issues with computer storage, including the separation of samples from finished tracks, or proprietary file formats that require archival versions of software. Still, Iron Mountain tells Mix that “if the platters are spinning and not damaged,” it can access the content.

But “if it runs” is a big question mark. Musicians and studios who now dig into their archives to remaster tracks often find that drives, even when stored at industry-standard temperature and humidity, have somehow failed, 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 enclosure with the packaging and the labels from wherever they bought it still in it,” Koszela says. “Next to it is an enclosure with the security drive in it. Everything is fine. And they’re both bricks.”

Entropy wins

Mix’s passing on of Iron Mountain’s warning reached Hacker News earlier this week, leading to other stories about trusting the wrong formats. The gist of it: You can’t trust any medium, so you copy your important stuff over and over, to new storage. “Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings crash, flash storage loses charge, etc.,” writes user abracadaniel. “Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect.”

There are arguments about how SSDs are not suitable for archiving at all; how the quality of floppy disks varied wildly between the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s; how Linear Tape-Open, a format designed specifically for long-term tape storage, is becoming less and less compatible with each generation; how the ring binders we put our CD-Rs and DVD-Rs in cause them to bend too much and become unreadable.

Knowing that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new. Ars wrote about the five stages of hard drive death , including denial, in 2005. Last year, the backup company Backblaze shared failure data on specific drives, showing that drives that fail most often fail within three years, that no drive was ruled out entirely, and that time generally wears down all drives. Google’s server disk data from 2007 showed that HDD failures were mostly unpredictable, and that temperature wasn’t really the deciding factor.

So Iron Mountain’s warning to music companies is just another warning about something we’ve heard before. But it’s always good to get some new data about how vulnerable a good archive really is.