Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying

Enlarge / Hard drives, unfortunately, tend to die not with a spectacular and sparkly bang, but with a head-is-stuck whimper. (credit: Getty Images)

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone’s data stored on spinning disks.

“In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know,” Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. “It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call for action.”