But Mulholland did not draw down the water behind the St. Francis despite so many warnings of impending failure, and 600 people died as a result.

William Mulholland didn't take action when the St. Francis Dam performed similarly, and after his inspection, killed up to 600 people twelve hours after his inspection.

Unfortunately, USB requires much CPU power. Some folks believe Intel pushed USB so hard specifically because it required higher-powered CPUs to run effectively, unlike the competing FireWire which is DMA.

Not based on, but actually total fiction inspired by.

Some folks still think it was local jet traffic that made the noise that scared them all so much that they ran out of the tent, lost their lights and senses of direction, and died of exposure. It's just much more likely than a freak sound event.

As I posted before, this study had included non-enterprise drives which any thoughtful enterprise data preservation expert would not have ever used for enterprise data storage.

I visited part of Bletchley Park in the late 2000s and it was a ruin. The guard at the gate house said they are very much in need of money. The buildings were falling down.

Sure, it is a site of historical importance, but even the Enigma-cracking computers like the esteemed Alan Turing's bombe were dismantled and scrapped decades ago, and the hundreds of subsequent generations which won the war of the Atlantic are all over the world in both their original form, as replicas, and as computer emulations.

I just toileted three Seagate Barracuda drives of varying vintage, from three to five years old. I don't understand why my Western Digital, Samsung, Hitachi, and Toshiba drives don't crap out so soon.

In particular, Samsung F1 drives just flat out refuse to die, so why isn't any of that rubbing off on new owner Seagate?

Was this a Seagate scandal or actually a MiniScribe scandal (acquired by Maxtor, acquired by Seagate)?

Yes. The IBM "Pixie Dust" technology wasn't quite ready or understood well enough to be manufactured in a repeatable, reliable way.

Though sometimes quoted that this was the reason IBM exited the hard drive manufacturing business, it was a minor factor at best. IBM had been seeking a buyer for that business unit well before Pixie Dust spawned the annoying DeskStar "DeathStar" jokes.

Maxtor bought MiniScribe and their warehouse full of actual bricks in hard drive boxes.

This study is interesting, but consumer-grade hard drives are exactly not supposed to be used in this way. I worked on server-grade hard drives (also 3.5") that were going seven years old without spinning down and getting slammed hard all day, every day. The failure rate was less than 1% for all brands in seven years' time in an array that filled two server racks. The 2.5" drives are even better.

Vibrations causing failure? Brother label makers? Isn't this the online storage vendor that was bragging about shucking portable hard drives to get around a soft embargo imposed during the Indonesian flood crisis?

This is true, but most contemporary systems aren't SWM (which is a DirecTV term). DISH Network has a similar band-stacking technology but it's also rather rare and expensive and only found on relatively new installations. It's nice to see the major satellite TV providers have embraced band-stacking so we don't need so many cables and complicated switches anymore, even if it's at a premium price.

Yes, coaxial cable is absolutely required. Don't skimp. It has more bandwidth and it's 100% reliable.

When I renovated the basement, I bought a spool of quad-shield dual-line RG-6 cable with copper core and ran it to every wall in the basement and to every wall on the main floor. Then I ran a pair to every bedroom since I was able to use a riser to the attic. Then used a high-frequency splitter in the basement. This is how you get whole-house DVR working properly.

You *want* to have RG-6 copper-core cable to each point in addition to ethernet. You need it for all home television service. No matter cable, FiOS/fiber, U-verse, or IP-TV, they all use MoCa to communicate with the other TVs and you want to have that. Satellite also needs two cables to each point.

Plus your home DVR solution, whether cable, satellite, will use the RG-6 cable with MoCa to distribute the video to your TVs. The MoCa connection will be the only one that will allow you to reliably distribute non-buffered HDTV to all televisions in the house from a whole-house DVR. FiOS, for one, requires it.

RG-6 is not for analog--it's for modern televisions of all types.