This article is too vague. It sounds like they're talking about the physical drive not working, but they're giving examples where you can't playback because you need to install the correct old software, plugins, etc... Which doesn't have anything to do with hard drives.
So what's actually wrong with hard drives for archival? Do they deteriorate? Do they "rot" like DVDs/blurays/etc have been known to do? Or is this just an ad for their archival service?
Magnetic HDDs do suffer bit rot, yes. But perhaps more importantly the mechanisms suffer physical failure over time. You can't just pop the platters into a new drive, even if you had an identical model.
That's really the main disadvantage of hard drives: the media is permanently coupled to the drive. If your tape drive fails, you can just pop the tape into a working drive and still get your data back.
With older drives, pre-about-2010 I think, you can, as I understand it.
After that they added little NVRAM chips to the boards which hold data about the disk, so you need to make sure they match. I just fried a HDD controller with a bad SATA cable, so I'm having to switch the chip from one board to another to try to recover the data.
Oh dear, here we're talking about age deterioration. Swapping media as a solution only works if the remanence hasn't decayed below the recoverable threshold.
All magnetic media suffers bit rot by remanence decay (a natural analog phenomenon). It's just that tape by virtue of its construction and type of recording process has better data (S/N) margins (its storage longevity is better).
Hard drives are known to suffer "sticktion" where the heads get stuck to the platter and either the drive won't spin up or it spins up and the heads damage the platters. I imagine hard drives could also have bad capacitors but I haven't heard of that happening.
In the old drives of 5" HDDs the head stepper motor shaft was external, and if a drive got stuck a slight twist of the stepper shaft would unstick the heads after which the drive would spin up (well, as long as it didn't rip heads off the HDA so it was always a calculated risk).
Happened to me when I got a call out to a large UK outfit who'd have an extended power cut and knew recovery was going to be fun. First stop was a particularly critical PC which had exactly this problem, so open the case, touch the HDD just right and off it went - happy with that, and to the next item.
Anyway, the recovery operation went well, and this particular incident came floating back by way of a hushed comment from a manager a few years later about this tech who'd come in to help with the recovery, and who'd "...laid his hands on the PC, and it came back to life!" :)
>I imagine hard drives could also have bad capacitors but I haven't heard of that happening.
That's very unlikely. If you're thinking of the "capacitor plague" of the 2000s, that only affected electrolytic capacitors, since it was caused by the Chinese poorly copying the formula for capacitor electrolyte. I don't believe hard drives used electrolytic capacitors in that time period, simply due to their size, though I could be wrong.
That seems like it could be solved by (carefully) disassembling the drive for long term storage, adding a thin piece of paper or tape under the heads, etc.
Disassembling a drive just allows dust to get in and cause more damage. Come to think of it, in recent drives the heads fully unload onto a ramp so they're probably less likely to stick.
So what's actually wrong with hard drives for archival? Do they deteriorate? Do they "rot" like DVDs/blurays/etc have been known to do? Or is this just an ad for their archival service?