Keeping things
February 4th, 2010 by rbanks
Hard Drives: Our Society’s Working Memory
“Modern drives might not fare so well, though. The storage density on hard drives is now over 200 gigabits per square inch and still climbing fast. While today’s drives have sophisticated systems for compensating for the failure of small sectors, in general the more bits of data you cram into a material, the more you lose if part of it becomes degraded or damaged. What’s more, a decay process that would leave a large-scale bit of data readable could destroy some smaller-scale bits. “The jury is still out on modern discs. We won’t know for another 20 years,” says Murrell.”
PSFK
