While interesting, the devil is in the details, and these are more less all generalizations. So yeah, don't go out and buy a Seagate built with those specific specs. That said, usually you can't tell wtf you are buying until you have it at home, crack the box and look at the serial numbers and such, at which point you are probably SOL anyway as it is yours now.

The analysis looks at the Hitachi drives as the best, which were acquired by WD. However they were acquired by Hitachi from IBM before that. IBM had it's own scandal for anyone that cares to remember for 1) The "DeathStar" class of drives that had an industry worst failure rate once upon a time for whatever reason, and 2) leaked documents about warranties and planned obsolesce, in that an approximate 3 year failure rate was more less built into drives for commercial reasons (i.e. to sell more hard drives). They were designed for 3 year lifespans, though they didn't intentionally fail after that.

Anyway it all depends. Certain drives, made at certain times, made by certain manufactures, *may* have higher or lower failure rates... This is why this topic is so hard to pin down...

I liken it to back in the golden age of OC CPU, people would be very particular to get lots or batches of certain CPU that would perform much better than their counterparts. However it had the same issue. You buy it, usually without knowing that kind of detail, roll the dice, and hope when you open the box it is the right serial number, etc...

Though where the similarity is really close it is by regional manufacturing. I vaguely recall some Intel CPU being make in Thailand, and others being made in Malaysia, and one being better than the other back in the day for a certain spec... I doubt it is much of a causality leap to infer that the drives made in China may be of lesser quality than those made in Thailand during that period of time...

One other thing to remember with computer electronic is binning. Usually in *any* electronics manufacturing process there will be binning where after QA testing, a product could pass, it could fail, or it could marginally pass and be classified as another product. As you may recall, after the whole Thailand flood, either for real or imaginary (for profit), there was a shortage of drives, and the prices doubled, then tripled. It would be VERY hard for any company to not cheat a bit in the binning process when the profit is triple what they used to make. So perhaps usually drives that might otherwise be binned as marginal or failiure, were making it to market simply because the drive you used to pay 70$ for is now selling for 300$ and that is too good to pass up (particularly for short term CEO getting quarterly bonuses not overly concerned with long term implications of branding).

1) Cannot do automatic, corporate security has disabled all these features.
2) 2 backups? Never happens.
3) Ha ha ha! *wipes tear* Good one!

Tips:
At home with your own security, you can do automatic. Make peace that if your media drive fails it is gone (or pony up the $$$ for the duplicate backup storage if it is that important to you). Generally speaking backup your important stuff, personal pictures, files, taxes, etc... Once you take videos and the like out of the picture the amount of storage you really need for back up is very minimal. A 500 GB external for example.

At work where security monkeys may have disabled everything under the sun to "protect" your account and password, you can still run automatic backups under your accounts while you are logged in, which can be a PITA on resources while you try and work, however if you schedule it for over your lunch break, just lock your workstation and go to lunch.

Offsite is hard to do, unless you are OK with cloud storage and can pay for it. As a pretty low tech solution, get a safety deposit box at a bank, physically swap out an external HD as frequent as you care to do it. As someone else mentioned, should your house burn down, you likely have larger concerns anyway.

We have more guns per capita in Canada and much less violent crime rate in Canada.

Though I would say we share some similar challenges with Native communities. The problem is partially sustainability and part corruption. In many cases it just isn't feasible or reasonable. If you live in a remote community with little access, it isn't surprising that their are not a lot of jobs, and a lot of poverty. I moved away from home 2000km way for school and work. You cannot expect to stay where you are and somehow things magically just work out for you. Couple that with a population that is growing at several times the national average. Self governance also seems to have given rise to some Chiefs being pretty darn crooked, promoting internal inequality.

Not saying I have the answers, but the problems are pretty evident.

It isn't about minorities, it is about poverty, inequality, growing up in a hostile environment, with little opportunity.

LOL!

So funny... The answer is: "Of course not!"

They used the same BS argument up here in Canada to dismantle the gun registry recently that goes something like this:

Criminals don't follow the law, so we might as well get rid of it.

Pretty sure that is the definition of "criminal" is someone that "doesn't follow a law", which you only have should "laws" exist. That's like saying, why have a law about murder, as those pesky criminals are just gonna go murder anyway. Ridiculous. The whole point of said laws is A) to limit access to firearms, and B) to enable police by providing them with additional tools to do their jobs: Enforcing laws, catching and putting criminals away.

First of all many private companies do the same, in fact have a much more draconian systems, whereby emails older than a week are deleted. This is for liability reasons. Everyone likes to compare private industry to government and why can't government be more like private industry, so there you go, you get your wish.

Second speaking from experience any manager with an IQ larger than a bedbug knows not to send anything sensitive or contentious via email because some sort of record is kept. Instead, it is done with a series of phone calls or face to face meetings. Problem solved, and issue averted. Anytime I get a phone call this is what I expect, something to be discussed or directed without generating an email record. Typically to avoid implication and to avoid responsibility. I've personally had the exact situation where I was being told by management not to disclose information being requested. My response was to send that to me in an email, as it is my ass on the line at that point, and I want a record that I was told to do so from my superiors. Management is perfectly willing to let someone else be the fall guy/scape goat and throw some employee under the bus for their shenanigans. Not to long ago there were several Canadian political examples, where a junior staffer, or intern were fired for inappropriate actions that they supposedly did of their own accord, and my first thought was, yeah right, i'm sure...

I'M BATMAN!

I manage a few enterprise level applications and databases, and it is much the same, to a lesser degree. I recently discovered a bug in our code which a contractor inserted that didn't understand the business rules which no one caught and had been generating bad data for about 6 months. It was done in such a way that unless you were actually looking for it (I discovered by accident while running some statistics that didn't add up which prompted me to investigate). Anyway how this all ties into the topic is that when we were trying to recover the data we looked to restore the data to specific records from backup, which we found to have been last done 9 months previous (I plan on having words about timely backup schedules). Anyway that would mean 3 months of transactions potentially lost, so not good. However we were able to restore 100% of the records from two different internal log tables that track particular changes. About the only thing it couldn't do was whoever setup the log tables back in the day, had a long date field going to a text field, which ended up losing the time component, which was pretty unnecessary for the business anyway.

Long story short, unless your systems are under like 6 feet of water like your example, good log files act as a redundant backup for critical fields/tables. The good news story here was the bank was able to fix the issue by the weekend, which was likely a whole IT team going nuts for several days. It took us nearly 3 weeks, though we really only had myself and two other guys working on it, and really we had the problem figured and a fix in about a week, but going through the various management, and proper verification, testing, staging, etc... prior to actual deployment took longer. Also while under pressure, it wasn't like it was a bank system either...

I think the key feature wasn't so much the reduction in heat, but the reduction of the amount of power required to run them, which of course has the positive side effect of a reduction of heat...

Built my current system about 2 years ago:

Case: Fractal Design Node 304
Mainboard: ASRock Z87E-ITX
CPU: Intel Core i5 4670K
Memory: Kingston KHX1600C10D3B1K2/16G
GPU: MSI Radeon HD 7850
Disks: Mushkin MKNSSDAT240GB Atlas mSATA 240GB SSD +3TB HD + 1TB HD + 500GB HD (I also have another 2TB sitting in a box).
Optical: ASUS SDRW-08D2S-U
OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64Bit
Monitor: ASUS VS238H-P 23IN
CPU Cooler: Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H90
PSU: Silverstone Strider ST60F-PS

Can be interesting trying to stuff everything in to a small ITX case. Got additional short PSU cables to help, but it is still pretty tight. Shortly afterwards I had some buyers remorse in not getting the i7 for an extra 100$, but really I've had no issues with the i5 so it is probably moot. I decided to get 16GB of RAM, which is a bit of overkill really, however I was more influenced by the fact that the MB only had two slots and its in an ITX case, so if I ever wanted to go beyond 8GB, it would be a super PITA to change out, it was inexpensive so what the hell right? Went with a pretty modest graphics card as the price was right, had to be careful of actual dimensions as not all would actually fit, so far pretty happy. It is primarily a gaming machine, and so far it hasn't balked at anything I've thrown at it, though that said I play DOTA2 99% of the time, which isn't all that demanding anyway. The SSD is kind of neat as it is a MSATA, which plugs into the back of the MB. On the plus side, the case includes 3 HD hangers to fit 6 drives (which are pretty cool btw), however the video card effectively reduces that number to 2HD hangers to fit 4 drives, but the SSD doesn't take up any of that space. On the negative side, it is on the back of the MB, in a tightly packed ITX case, with no removable back plate, which means it is effectively there forever, as I don't see myself ever totally dissembling everything to get at it again. The optical was a good decision also. It is external. I use it rarely. I plug it in when I need to, and when I don't it sits in my desk out of the way. Win7 as didn't want to deal with Win8 at the time. Got the cooler for giggles mostly, it's the biggest you can possibly fit in the case, so that is kind of fun.... PSU had several nice features, size being one of them being important in an ITX case (it is smaller), its HE yet still a decent amount of headroom in total wattage, and it also was modular and had optional short cables, also important in an ITX case. So far I have 3 of 4 hard dives installed. I had a 2TB fail on me, replaced it when a 3TB, then had the warrently go through and got a free 2TB, however I still have plenty of space so I have never bothered to hook up the new 2TB into the system. Once the 3TB media drive starts getting too full, I'll probably throw it in there, as there is just room enough. Anyway I am pretty happy with my system. It is a gaming system, but an intermediate one. Another important purchase I made afterwards was a silent mouse, making girlfriend compatible gaming much more enjoyable! :)

People have know this since the Patriot Act originally came out. It allowed the US government to pretty much arbitrarily look at any of your data, provided it was located on US soil. So most of us have been avoiding using US servers, data centers, and companies for anything much important anyway. You can still use them, just not for anything critical.

The whole NSA thing may have made it a bit more high profile, but most of their partner groups, things like gmail and the like, nobody should be using for critical or sensitive information anyway. That is more about individual personal consumer use. Businesses using these sorts of services aren't presumably really aren't all that concerned about security anyway.

Somebody is paying for that debt. If it isn't that guy, then you can bet the rest of us are footing the bill for his freeloading.

Take some responsibility for your life. Too many people out there seem to think they are entitled to things just because they exist. So you made some bad life choices. Make some better ones, do something about it.

This is why I dislike Dark Matter (the concept, not the new TV show).

We can't observe or measure it, however our calculations don't add up, so whatever doesn't make sense we're going to call it "Dark Matter"...

Okdokie then!

It is stuff like this that wants me to punch her in her stupid face.

First of all I have no doubt she is an intelligent person, she is a female CEO of one of the largest media companies in Canada, she probably has a pile of degrees, and lots of real world experience in business, licencing, content generation, copyright law, etc...

So when she spouts BS like that, I have to think she doesn't really believe that tripe, but rather is using the media as a propaganda machine to try and influence people to an opinion that has a positive effect on her company (who wants to sell competing CraveTV, as well as paying licencing fees both in Canada and the US, etc...). So that pretty much means that she is purposefully lying, on the understanding that she thinks of her clients, and the public in general are complete idiots and will gobble up whatever she has to say, talking inflammatory language as theft, etc... it is barely even copyright infringement, as these people are actually paying for the service in the first place, at worst is is jurisdictional content licencing abuse... nothing is enough for these people. Face Punch.

Metric VS Imperial? How are we not discussing Slashdot unit equivalents (Other than to call Metric Rebel Scum!)?

Volume: Libraries of Congress
Length: Football Fields
Weight: Cowboy Neals
etc...

Technically there is already such a thing as a metric ton.

In fact it is already in the urban usage you describe:

I don't give a metric fuckton about your imperial units...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...