A reader asks:
“If I safely store away a 2TB HDD and never plug it in again, how long will all my data be retained?”
Retained? Or “retained in useful form?”
The magnetic encoding will be detectable for a very long time — centuries, even — provided that the drive is physically undamaged and undisturbed. Heck, scientists can read the natural magnetic domains that occur in rocks even millions of years old.
But saying “the 1s and 0s survived in detectable form” is not the same as saying “the data will be readable and useful.”
Consider: Say you found this IBM hard drive in an attic. Say that, improbably, it was in perfect working order. What would you do with it?
Even if the 1s and 0s are still intact on the disk/drum, so what? The drive doesn’t use any current data-storage format. (That drive used 6-bit characters, unlike today’s 8-bit bytes.) You’d need to find a working IBM computer of the same vintage; vintage power supplies; vintage software and instruction manuals; and you’d have to write custom software to convert the old data format into something today’s software could interpret….
And that drive is just from a few decades ago!
Your 2TB hard drive would suffer a similar fate. Even if the stored drive survived the degradation of the lubricants on its moving parts (you did say HDD, not SDD) and the eventual breakdown of its plastic circuit boards and components, within a few decades the drive won’t fit any hardware outside of museums; and no one will be running the software or have the knowledge necessary to do useful work with whatever data is on the drive — at least, not without a ton of hassle.
Most experts say the average useful life of a consumer-grade hard drive is around 5-ish years. By that point, wear and tear are beginning to affect the components; and the march of time is starting to make the data, and the formats it’s recorded in, and the software needed to recover and use the data, increasingly obsolete.
Long-term data storage requires periodic refreshing of the data, including moving it to newer/better media and formats as they become available.
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I have a working 5150 IBM PC with a 30mb RLL hard drive. Think I installed that drive around 1993. Still boots up and runs from the hard drive. More of an exception to the rule than the typical results. I also had the controller card bolted to the bottom of an old 80gb Maxtor drive go up in flames when powered on and early 90’s vintage SCSI drives loose their ability to become ready or start dropping bits and become unreadable after 10 years of storage. YMMV