That's exactly what laptop drives are designed for, cycles. You expect power management to be spinning your disk down regularly.

But portable drives in particular feature specific mechanical features which do handle vibration. And anyway, you want your NAS to have cushioning for the drives, because otherwise it will make horrible noises. Well, they're horrible to me.

Desktop tape drives were shit and their tapes often unreadable after just short periods. Unless you bought a used exabyte drive, your tape drive at home was certainly shit during that era. Zip drives never held whole HDDs worth of data, and you may have forgotten that they cost $15/100MB, they are probably the most expensive removable media ever (not counting stacks of platters from vintage DASDs, which are not conveniently swappable) after the original MO drives. We can still use removable hard drives, there are many solutions for that. And we still have "other media". Your complaint is nonsense. HDDs are so cheap now you can just buy a second HDD, back up to it, and then disconnect it — in comparison to the rest of the PC, it's cheaper now than it's ever been and also cheaper now than backups have ever been before.

There are multiple purposes for backups. A backup which only protects you against failures is still a backup. It's not an archival backup, or a library backup, but yes, it is still a backup. Not meeting your arbitrary standards doesn't change that.

My OS doesn't do that automatically, you insensitive clod! Actually, I'm booted into Win7 right now which does, but I also run linux which doesn't. (I tried following the instructions for bcache some time ago, but they didn't work, and I haven't tried again since. Maybe someday when a linux distribution supports it out of the box on install. As popular as it is, that ought to be sometime in 2025

The legalize marijuana petition on change.org had less than nothing to do with any of that, as it was roundly ignored by the administration just as we all knew it would be even though they'd promised to listen to us, because all the important campaign promises were empty, so why not that one? Just like the old boss, the old boss +1, ad infinitum.

It might, if it weren't happening so quickly.

What is the value of get around the law technology?

When the law is for sale to the highest bidder, technology that lets everyone else get around it is quite valuable indeed.

It's just that: how many hours it's designed to be turned on for. Compare to a lightbulb labeled to last for 1,000 hours but marketed as lasting for two years, with the fine print explaining "* when used for an hour per day". The expectation is that this particular drive will last for 24 calendar months, but that it won't be powered up and spinning the whole time. Imagine an office computer that gets turned off at night and weekends, and puts itself to sleep regularly throughout the day.

Given that this is a desktop-grade hard drive, that light duty cycle is probably not unreasonable. In any event, I'm sure Seagate has done their homework and 2,400 is the line between "we can reject warranty claims with 'you overworked it' as the reason" and "if we say our drive only lasts 2,000 hours, no one will buy it".

My biggest complaint with it is that there's no way that can responsibly listed as a NAS drive, but that's what their data sheet says it's good for. If you dropped that in a NAS, either it'd be spun up the whole time and burn through its specced lifetime in three months, or it'd be spinning up and down constantly and cause terrible performance with huge latencies on first reads after the drive falls asleep.

There's a difference between powered hours and total expected lifetime. These drives have a two year warranty, so they're betting that it will last for at least 1,200 powered up hours per year, or about 3 hours a day. Also, MTBF does not mean that a single drive will last 875,000 hours (or 100 years), just that only one in hundred drives is expected to die per year.

In the same data sheet, they claim the drive is ideal for:

- Desktop or all-in-one PCs
- Home servers
- PC-based gaming systems
- Desktop RAID
- Direct-attached external storage devices (DAS)
- Network-attached storage devices (NAS)

Maybe that's why they bumped the load/unload cycles to 300,000 when they went from 500GB to 750GB: so the drive can spin up and down constantly so that it's only spinning the bare minimum of time necessary. Never mind that almost no NAS will have this set up by default, because that'd be a horrible user experience and everyone would complain to support that it takes 10 seconds to start retrieving a file each time they go to access it.

I'm sorry. You must have Linux confused with Windows Server Core.

Other than greed, I can't understand why they don't just make an agreement with Google or Mozilla - preferably both - to have one of their browsers automatically installed with Windows.

Control. If it's delivered by Microsoft then Microsoft gets the blame when something goes wrong, and rightly so. Also, giving up competition entirely means giving up control over the future of the Net. Finally, having a browser means being able to test net-facing code before implementing it on server.

That's an attractive offer, but there's zero chance I'm going to be the first to try a new technology that Seagate's just now rolling out.

I think we should name the NSA's jabber chatroom for them! I was going to throw "SexyFederalAgents" out there, but it's really not my best work.

Most of my data is infrequently-accessed video files. I edit them down and upload them to youtube but I keep the raw video around for future projects. A 4TB rotational drive should do me for a few years worth of videos, but I'm still tempted to set up a storage server on my network so I can play around with Hadoop's hdfs.