Farming Hard Drives (2012)

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/

23•floriangosse•6d ago

Comments

atYevP•5d ago

Good times...

/stares wistfully off into the distance

gadders•2h ago

Great hardware knowledge. Appalling backup software.

I got told by their support that I had to change my password for their service. Opened the website, went to my account and tried to change my password. Didn't work.

Got told by their customer support that you have to use the "lost password" method.

How hard is it to right a password reset method that works?

gradschool•2h ago

Former backblaze customer here, the trick is that you can't copy and paste your password as one might do with a password manager. You have to type it manually so that the web page can interactively tell you how strong the password is getting as you type it.

Backblaze lost me as a customer due to the new password and 2FA requirements, which would lock me out if I were to lose my devices, the exact scenario I'm trying to mitigate. Not affiliated, I'm now trying my luck with pixeldrain, mega, and koofr (having quit proton lately as well since it broke rclone compatibility a few weeks ago).

gadders•2h ago

Crashplan used to work well, but they decided they didn't want retail customers (and now apparently do again).

qingcharles•52m ago

I've not had a single lick of trouble with Mega. I try to use it for all my work as it is very reliable and their online file browser is top class.

Koofr is one of the ones offering lifetime plans right? I'm always getting spammed with their offers. Wonder how they compare to pCloud?

philipwhiuk•1h ago

Going around to lots of stores burning fuel depriving regular consumers of inventory forcing them onto your cloud solution.

It's classic SV screw-regular-folk-as-long-as-its-not-banned.

fwipsy•1h ago

Devil's advocate: Individual users probably aren't filling a 3tb hard drive most of the time. (This may not apply to HN users, but I imagine most people buy a hard drive larger than they need and never fill it up.) So arguably, Backblaze used the drives more efficiently, because each drive benefited many users and its entire capacity would be used.

gwbas1c•1h ago

That's not appropriate. People buy those drives to do whatever the ^#$^#$ they want to do with them. Backblaze's service may or may not be an effective replacement for what people wanted the drives for.

Unearned5161•22m ago

doesn't Backblaze largely do backups? as in their customer's already have the files on their own large drives and they need to back those files up, as in maybe you're reading too much into this?

MarkusWandel•1h ago

What fraction of external hard disks is still "shuckable" these days? I know the WD Passports aren't. The USB connector is directly on the drive's PCB, no SATA bridge.

zampano•1h ago

I think a lot of the larger form-factor/larger capacity models are still shuckable, though sometimes you still have to put kapton tape on one of the pins to allow it to work with a normal machine.

rzzzt•10m ago

Pin 3 on the power connector used to be constant 3.3V, but its purpose changed to keeping the drive in a low-power shutdown state for enabling e.g. staggered spinup: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-sata-power-disable-fea...

sfblah•58m ago

I just checked and it looks like this company has never turned a profit. I don't really know why anyone would even use their product, since it's so easy just to use the various cloud systems out there instead of storing any meaningful data locally. Will they turn a profit before this business model totally is outmoded?

MatthiasPortzel•8m ago

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Farming Hard Drives (2012)

Comments

Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

HP SitePrint

JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

Cryptographic Issues in Cloudflare's Circl FourQ Implementation (CVE-2025-8556)

Linux Capabilities Revisited

Look, Another AI Browser

42,600 ton ship to break the world record for the deepest drill at 7 miles

Bild AI (YC W25) Is Hiring a Founding AI Engineer

MinIO stops distributing free Docker images

Scripts I wrote that I use all the time

Designing software for things that rot

AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

Show HN: Create interactive diagrams with pop-up content

SourceFS: A 2h+ Android build becomes a 15m task with a virtual filesystem

Introducing Galaxy XR, the first Android XR headset

Cyborgs vs. rooms, two visions for the future of computing

The security paradox of local LLMs

Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites

Die shots of as many CPUs and other interesting chips as possible

The Logarithmic Time Perception Hypothesis

Farming Hard Drives (2012)

Patina: a Rust implementation of UEFI firmware

How do LLM's trade off lives between different categories?

French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

Rivian's Also E-bike is like nothing you've ever seen

Go subtleties

Evaluating the Infinity Cache in AMD Strix Halo

Show HN: Cadence – A Guitar Theory App

Power over Ethernet (PoE) basics and beyond