History 2004: Is REV as Reliable as Sealed 2.5-Inch HDD?

StorageNewsletter: Is REV as reliable as a sealed 2.5-inch HDD?

Werner Heid: It depends. If you use it in an application for permanent use like a hard drive, when you permanently hit the system, you really don’t need the removability, I think you better have a 2.5-inch hard drive. If you ask me the question: ‘Is REV as reliable or better than a conventional hard drive system today in backup and archiving world’, the answer is yes.

What kind of cleanroom class do you have inside the REV cartridge?
200 to 400 after spin-up.

Would you recommend it not only for backup but also for long term archiving?
Yes. Because, if you look at it in comparison to tape today, people typically roll over the data on tape every three to five years depending on the policy of the company. We feel very secure that when you remove the cartridge from the drive, we can actually guarantee that the data will be there for about 30 years.

The drive is guaranteed for 2 years and the cartridge for 5 years. But do you guarantee vs. data loss?
To a certain degree. We have a recovery service staff. We didn’t announce it today.

Is it your own service or do you sub-contract it?
Both. We have a few people internally for really advanced cases. And we have an outside company.

Will it be free?
I think the first evaluation of what’s happening in the system is actually free. But can you absolutely guarantee no data loss? You can’t. Because I cannot really control what the customer is doing at the end of the day.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 196 on May 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.