Pinetree Peripherals

The team has completed a successful year providing world class support to the customers. The achievement gives us a good feeling for the needs for service. We are willing to look at providing this service throughout the US. Products covered are ADIC, QUANTUM. Storagetek, Sun, Dell, HP.M4DATA and Fujitsu. We will talk about your needs if you give us a call.

Pinetree Peripherals team has developed processes to repair these units.The successful repairs are at a level to minimize the need to buy additional units. We have measured the rate of repair up to 98% on some of the units. The team is proud of its success rate and very willing to demonstrate this to customers. Call for a quote and a RMA

Pinetree provides on site service for tape libraries made by ADIC, SUN, Storagetek, Dell, HP and Quantum. Call for pricing and available coverage options.

Pinetree has units for sale. The repair and refurb of these units has been enhanced with expanded testing.

Pinetree has developed a rebuild of the L20 hand that has the roller broken off. The part number is 309852001. The rebuild is done professionally so it blends in with the existing body color.

Pinetree has developed a rebuild of the mounting brackets that have been broken off the L700/L180 hand. The rebuild is blended into the frame to give a professional look. The part number is 303663802.

Why Tape???
Magnetic tape provides an economical, removable, reliable and well-supported medium to save the crown jewels of your business– YOUR DATA.

Do Burned CDs Have a Short Life Span?

John Blau, IDG News Service Tue Jan 10, 8:00 AM ET

Opinions vary on how to preserve data on digital storage media, such as optical CDs and DVDs. Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland, has his own view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime.

“Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD,” Gerecke says. “There are a few things you can do to extend the life of a burned CD, like keeping the disc in a cool, dark space, but not a whole lot more.”

The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data “shifting” on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam.

“Many of the cheap burnable CDs available at discount stores have a life span of around two years,” Gerecke says. “Some of the better-quality discs offer a longer life span, of a maximum of five years.”

Distinguishing high-quality burnable CDs from low-quality discs is difficult, he says, because few vendors use life span as a selling point.
Similar Limitations

Hard-drive disks also have their limitations, according to Gerecke. The problem with hard drives, he says, is not so much the disk itself as it is the disk bearing, which has a positioning function similar to a ball bearing. “If the hard drive uses an inexpensive disk bearing, that bearing will wear out faster than a more expensive one,” he says. His recommendation: a hard-drive disk with 7200 revolutions per minute.

To overcome the preservation limitations of burnable CDs, Gerecke suggests using magnetic tapes, which, he claims, can have a life span of 30 years to 100 years, depending on their quality. “Even if magnetic tapes are also subject to degradation, they’re still the superior storage media,” he says.

But he’s quick to point out that no storage medium lasts forever and, consequently, consumers and business alike need to have a migration plan to new storage technologies.

“Companies, in particular, need to be constantly looking at new storage technologies and have an archiving strategy that allows them to automatically migrate to new technologies,” he says. “Otherwise, they’re going to wind up in a dead-end. And for those sitting on terabytes of crucial data, that could be a colossal problem.”