Every once in a while a vendor comes up with a catchy title for a white paper. Today, Cybernetics' "The Risk of a Disk-Only Backup Strategy: The Case for Disk and Tape" crossed my desk. Being an open-minded kind of guy, I figured I'd give it a read. After a couple of sensible pages about how hard drives fail in use and tapes on the shelf are pretty stable, it tries to prove its point with laboratory tests of how well hard drives and tapes work after being dropped. This begs the question: "Who takes their backup disks out of the RAID array and drops them?"

After scientific testing at Percept Technology Labs, it was proven that you can drop a Seagate Barracuda 24 inches, but 40% fail if dropped from a meter, and all fail if dropped from 4 feet. On the other hand, more than 90% of the tape cartridges could still be read when dropped from 5 feet.

The whole test seems really contrived to me. Even if they wanted to prove tapes are more rugged than disks, they should compare them to removable disk technology like Imation's Odyssey or RDX. They use 2.5-inch laptop drives that Seagate rates at 900g shock resistance, as opposed to the 300g for the Barracuda, and then wrap them in a plastic shell with additional shock mounts.

Tape does have its advantages. Low cost per terabyte, portability, zero power consumption in storage and 10 to 20 year data retention are tapes advantages. Playing up drop ability is just a stretch.

If dropping things on hard surfaces facinates you you can find the whitepaper here: http://go.techtarget.com/r/3025197/916529
or I suggest watermelons.