Interesting. This happened at about 13,000 feet.
Paul
Eric O'Brien wrote:
On Oct 22, 2006, at 7:33 AM, Paul Fretheim wrote:
<snip>
I was on a long hike with a young woman recently. We were
climbing Mt.
Whitney from the west side, which requires a long approach of a
few days
hiking. She was using a Canon digital and had a small hard drive
with
her to store her images so she could download the card in her
camera and
have more space to shoot. After 5 days of hiking in somewhat dusty
conditions, the hard drive malfunctioned and most of her work
was lost.
I wonder if it was altitude (reduced atmospheric pressure) rather
than dust? I recall reading somewhere about people encountering
altitude limits on either hard drives or possibly even compact
memory cards. (I can't quite see why a card would be affected,
though.)
Of course, dead is dead, regardless of the cause. But if it was
air pressure, "better dust filters" wouldn't make any
difference. And, gee, I thought that drives were sealed anyway. ?
Hard drives are sealed,but they definitely have operational altitude
limits (actually atmospheric pressure), typically rated around 10,000
feet, for this reason. I'd never trust an off the shelf hard drive in
extreme conditions like this (and very high or low altitudes are
extreme conditions). Besides, flash memory is extremely cheap these
days, it's getting harder to imagine trusting a cheap spinning disk
when I can get as much flash as I could need, and it's much more
durable.
Just for instance, here is what Western Digital says for its drives:
I've personally had far few failures with digital photography than
film... but they fail in different ways. But frankly this anecdote is
just about someone using their equipment out of spec, and so
constitutes a "dumb user" moment. Film has its failure points too.
-Rh
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