Hi 
I'm looking for a pretty specific info about hard drives. I'm planning on buying two 2TB(most probably Seagate XT) harddrives, that will be used by me as a storage. I have lots of stuff that I gathered over the years on CD's and DVD's and I'm planning on rearranging it in some better and easier way. Hard drives seem like a perfect solution.
Now, the data on the hard drive, are in the end just a magnetic signals, that over time must fade away. Or at least that's what logic tells me. So my question is as follows: How often should I OVERWRITE(obviously with the same data) the things written on the hard drive to prevent it from loosing some of the data on the hard drive due to magnetic data becoming to weak to read from the hard drive?
If the hard drive will be left untouched for say 2 years, the data will still be 100% readable? What if it will be 5 years, 10 years? Obviously I don't mean the situation where the hard drive is connected to the PC during that time, but the situation where the hard drive is stored on a shelf in a antistatic bag, and inside the plastic box that comes with the hard drive.
Some people are ignoring questions like that, from what I gathered over the web, but from my basic knoledge about the hard drives, the drives won't be keeping the data forever. Sooner or later those data will "vanish". Literaly
I will appriciate any technical answer from somone with enough knoledge and expertise in this region.
cheers
Lucas
I'm looking for a pretty specific info about hard drives. I'm planning on buying two 2TB(most probably Seagate XT) harddrives, that will be used by me as a storage. I have lots of stuff that I gathered over the years on CD's and DVD's and I'm planning on rearranging it in some better and easier way. Hard drives seem like a perfect solution.
Now, the data on the hard drive, are in the end just a magnetic signals, that over time must fade away. Or at least that's what logic tells me. So my question is as follows: How often should I OVERWRITE(obviously with the same data) the things written on the hard drive to prevent it from loosing some of the data on the hard drive due to magnetic data becoming to weak to read from the hard drive?
If the hard drive will be left untouched for say 2 years, the data will still be 100% readable? What if it will be 5 years, 10 years? Obviously I don't mean the situation where the hard drive is connected to the PC during that time, but the situation where the hard drive is stored on a shelf in a antistatic bag, and inside the plastic box that comes with the hard drive.
Some people are ignoring questions like that, from what I gathered over the web, but from my basic knoledge about the hard drives, the drives won't be keeping the data forever. Sooner or later those data will "vanish". Literaly
I will appriciate any technical answer from somone with enough knoledge and expertise in this region.
cheers
Lucas
