Even if they don’t provide source code, a Debian based package would cover a
large portion of home Linux users and corporate workstations.Many Linux distributions are based on Debian or Ubuntu which is also based on Debian. The users of other distributions are either corporate or more technically inclined and would be more likely to use Wine or virtual machines to run the BackBlaze client, or setup other backup solutions.

I’ve had three Seagates die in the past 4 years, all were between 1-4 years old at time of failure. Yet, I still have two older Seagates in service, 5-8 years old. My other drives, mostly WD 4-10 years old, and one Toshiba 6 years old. Most recent purchase, HGST almost a year old, was bought due to frustration with Seagates failing, and seeing this report from BackBlaze.

It may be that around 5 years ago, Seagate just had some quality or process changes that resulted in more frequent drive failures, or maybe they are just more prone to sudden electronics failure in my box, don’t know for sure. But, for me, I’m not running enough drives for the lower price to overcome the higher failure rate, though that works in the BackBlaze use case.

I’ve been building workstations for me and family for 20+ years. My best advice, multiple copies on separate drives (aka backup). Anything important to you should be on multiple drives ASAP, even if that means backing up your documents between two Windows PCs.
Once a drive is 3 years old, it needs to be in a raid mirror or weekly backup to another NEWER drive. With a pair of 5 year old drives, when one fails it’s not surprising to see it’s partner die while copying stuff off to a new one. So have it’s pair or copy be on a newer drive.

oh man, thanks for that =)

shill much?

Why use SSHD? it is only marginally better than a regular HDD… the only use I see for them is a games console. And I do own one of them.

Thank you for your feedback. It was helpful :)

You’re probably not going to glean the data you’re looking for from this post – the drives we use are 3.5-inch models you’d find in a desktop computer as opposed to the smaller 2.5-inch ones you need in a laptop.

Having said that, I’ve found “best bang for the buck” when it comes to storage performance for older laptops is to replace the spinning hard disk drive with an solid state drive (SSD). SSDs offer much faster read and write speeds than hard drives do, don’t use as much power and don’t make noise, either. You’ll see your computer booting faster, apps will load quicker, and the system will just in general be more responsive with an SSD than with an HDD.

Lots of companies make SSDs that are plug-and-play replacements for hard drives.

In terms of longevity, SSDs are better than ever before. But the most important thing is that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket – SSD or hard drive, having a solid backup strategy is vital. That way, when your machine inevitably develops a problem, you’l have something to recover from.