[HN Gopher] Farming Hard Drives (2012)
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Farming Hard Drives (2012)
Author : floriangosse
Score : 38 points
Date : 2025-10-16 05:50 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.backblaze.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.backblaze.com)
| atYevP wrote:
| Good times...
|
| /stares wistfully off into the distance
| gadders wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Crashplan used to work well, but they decided they didn't
| want retail customers (and now apparently do again).
| hobs wrote:
| I saw they attempted to pivot into corporate spyware and it
| hasn't done as well as they thought.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| mastax wrote:
| I don't think it is immoral to purchase products from retail
| stores.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Yep.
|
| And when that's a problem, it's fine to just cut and
| insulate 3.3v wire that feeds the power supply's SATA
| connectors.
|
| After this modification, the machine thus becomes
| compatible with all SATA hard drives, whether old or new or
| shucked or whatever.
|
| (Not much (if anything) in SATA land ever used 3.3v, and
| it's completely likely that nothing ever will. AFAICT, that
| voltage was deprecated with the release of revision 3.3 of
| the SATA specifications, from nearly a decade ago in
| February of '16.)
| toast0 wrote:
| > sometimes you still have to put kapton tape on one of the
| pins to allow it to work with a normal machine.
|
| It's easier to cut the 3.3v wire from the power supply. If
| you have color coded wires, it'll be the orange wire; if not,
| it'll be the same color as every other wire.
|
| To a first approximation, nothing ever uses 3.3v from sata
| power, so it made sense to remove it from the spec. Reusing
| the pins so that 3.3v inhibits functionality was kind of
| crazy though.
| sfblah wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Backblaze is a cloud storage company
| ethmarks wrote:
| The reason they're farming hard drives is so they can add them
| to their cloud storage network. You realize that cloud storage
| isn't actually in clouds, right? Hard drives are always local
| _somewhere_ , and in Backblaze's case that 'somewhere' is a
| data center.
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