The lifespan of a tape cartridge may surpass twenty years or over 5,000 “load/unload” cycles, an impressive result for a magnetic media. Even if the numbers look so huge, tape cartridges need to be maintened correctly or they’ll wear out much much faster, even in a few months.

There are few rules to follow to protect your tape cartridges and their precious content: the data.

1. Keep them in their plastic cases

Dust and dirt will ruin your tape. Keeping them in their plastic cases, when they’re not in the drive, will protect them. Don’t take them directly with your bare hands and maintain the environment clean. They should not be allowed to lay flat.

2. Temperature and humidity

Tape cartridges will last longer if stored in a stable cold and dry environment. Maintain the temperature below 23° Celsius degrees and the humidity under 70%. Tapes must be protected from direct sunlight and hot air.

3. Magnetic fields

Magnetic fields can corrupt data written on a tape. Electric motors or old-school display produce strong magnetic fields. Store your tapes far away from other electronic gear, better if in a metal shelf with doors: the Faraday cage will isolate them from magnetic fields.

4. Don’t move them often

The lesser you move a tape cartridge, the longer will be its lifespan. When you move your tapes to a new facility give them the time (24h) to be acclimated to the new environment.

5. Check the data periodically

It’s a best practice and it could save you day in case of disaster.

Today’s SSDs are fast and reliable storage solutions, far more cheaper than they were a few years ago. A 256GB high-end consumer unit can be bought for less than 150 dollars and the improvements over a traditional HD are tremendous: a SSD won’t make your Call of Duty frame rate higher, but your PC will be more reactive. You will save time in almost every operation.

The advantages are even higher in storage-intensive professional tasks.

As manufacturers move to higher density cells the lifespan of the memory chips decreases, but the overall lifespan of the disks stands still thanks to the advancements on the software side.

Ars Technica has published yesterday an interesting articles on how SSD works and why the TRIM support is important to maintain high performance over time.

Almost all the SSDs available today have some sort of Garbage Collection, a low-level service that re-organize data to improve performance. Garbage Collection is good but it’s not an alternative to TRIM support.

Furthermore, an aggressive Garbage Collection reduces the lifespan of your drive.

Anyway, Ars Technica made a great job explaining this and we suggest you to take 5 minutes and read their article: Ask Ars: “My SSD does garbage collection, so I don’t need TRIM… right?”

For further information also read: Solid-state revolution: in-depth on how SSDs really work