Timeline for Would a frozen Earth "brick" abandoned datacenters?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
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| Dec 20, 2020 at 0:18 | comment | added | Peter Cordes | (I don't know if data on a platter is typically encoded as "the data" and then some fully separate forward error correction, or if the whole 4k of data is distributed throughout whatever signals are on disk. It's likely that there's some kind of scrambling / encoding so long runs of 0s in the data don't lead to long runs of the same domain on the platter, but this encoding period might be shorter than the error-correction block size, i.e. HW sector size.) | |
| Dec 20, 2020 at 0:16 | comment | added | Peter Cordes |
@TheSq: except that old manuscripts have data in single characters, not in blocks of data + ECC codes of 4KiB of data encoded somehow (a hardware sector on rotational media). I'm not sure what kind of angular distance that is around the platter, but you might need a significant portion to know whether the data you read means anything (by having a whole sector you can decode). Letters on paper are generally huge compared to the resolution of the ink + paper, i.e. lots of difference between an a and an o, but high-density digital media tries to approach that limit with error correction.
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| Dec 18, 2020 at 17:11 | comment | added | The Square-Cube Law | @IanKemp I understand that it is hard, and will not give good results, but in the end it is possible; This is kinda like current archeologists dealing with old manuscripts (which have been burned, torn apart etc.), I figure. | |
| Dec 18, 2020 at 16:57 | comment | added | Ian Kemp | @TheSquare-CubeLaw That PopSci article is completely wrong about how difficult it would be to read data from a shattered hard disk platter - it is is a far, far more daunting task than taping bits of paper back together (platters are mostly made of glass nowadays, I imagine you understand how that behaves when shattered). Assuming you can physically reconstruct the platter to the point it can be read, the shattering will have disrupted the extremely sensitive magnetic fields storing the data, so you are likely to get partial data at best. | |
| Dec 17, 2020 at 18:07 | comment | added | The Square-Cube Law | @user253751 one of my professors at college worked for the federal police of Brazil, in the interpol branch. He told us in class that it is possible to obtain data from pieces of a cracked hard disc - and that there is machinery for that. Some googling seems to confirm that. This article in Popular Mechanics says: "Data on dented plates can be accessed much quicker than data on shattered drives". | |
| Dec 17, 2020 at 17:16 | comment | added | Criticizing Israel not allowed | Can the archeologists fix the crack? or read the data around the crack? | |
| Dec 17, 2020 at 5:37 | history | answered | L.Dutch♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |