Predicting archival life of removable hard disk drives

Abstract

A collaboration between the developer of a Removable Hard Disk Drive (RHDD) storage technology product and academics presents an accelerated life test of non-spinning powered down hard disks. The results are used to predict the reliability of removable disk cartridges stored in shirtsleeve environments as archival media. The contributions of this paper include an initial study of the reliability of data stored off-line on RHDDs, and a description of the industry standard accelerated life test process together with the methodology used to predict storage media reliability based on the results. Our study shows that removable hard disk drive technology has considerable potential as a reliable archival medium.