Steve Fosdick wrote:
The hazard with hard disks is that having such high capacity, on the rare occasions they do fail the effect is so much more significant which, of course, is why you want a backup copy in the first place.
The issue with hard disks is that they don't cope with offline storage very well. There are a variety of issues that will effect hard drives that only happen if the drive is left stored for long periods without power.
Stiction is one that can sometimes be overcome (although a drive that has suffered it should be discarded once the data has been copied off) but also if not stored in the right conditions condensation can form on the platter surface getting in through the atmospheric breather hole.
Another issue I have just recently discovered is I have a couple of drives from circa '92 that had some data on I wouldn't mind looking at again (mostly out of morbid curiosity at old college work etc) and I have found that I can't even get a drive controller to talk to them. They spin up, these are IDE but pre "auto" setup and I don't have the bios magic (sector count etc) that they were formatted to. I'm sure that isn't insurmountable given time and effort so they have been put aside for a rainy day.