Preservation articles

anatomy storage drive hard disk drives explainer storage hdd

The music industry's latest problem: Archive hard drives from the 90s are failing

TL;DR: The music industry is grappling with a looming crisis regarding its archive of 90s recordings stored on aging hard drives. According to data storage experts at Iron Mountain, around 20 percent of drives from the era are now unreadable. The company is raising concerns that, due to deteriorating formats, insufficient metadata, and increasing disk failures, a significant portion of these historic recordings could be lost forever if urgent action is not taken.