Seagate’s drives are improving, Western Digital’s are getting worse, and HGST’s are some of the most reliable drives out there.
That’s according to service records compiled by Blackblaze, a cloud backup provider, Ars Technica is reporting. Blackblaze makes a habit of regularly sharing their experience with various models of hard drives, a potentially valuable resource for anyone shopping for a drive.
If you wanted to run a scientific experiment on hard-drive lifespans, a data center with 56,224 drives would be a great place to start. This is what makes Blackblaze’s report such interesting reading: they have a lot of hard drives running constantly, and offer a lot of details about the 18 different models of hard drives in their center.
Some Western Digital Drives have worrying numbers. The 2TB WD20EFRX, for example, has a 9.92 percent failure rate in the nearly three years of record keeping. The worst HGST drive, for comparison, had a failure rate of 4.89 percent, while most were closer to one percent.
Seagate’s drives, which make up the bulk of the data center’s drives, scored generally worse than HGST’s, but better than Western Digital’s. The 4TB ST400DM00 accounts for over 29,000 of the data center’s drives, and has a failure rate of only 2.99 percent.
At the same time, some Seagate drives were so bad they needed to be pulled from the data center entirely. The 3TB ST300DM001, for example, had a catastrophic 28.34 percent failure rate before being pulled.
Toshiba drives had a failure rate of around 3 percent, but Blackblaze uses so few of them — fewer than 300 overall — that it’s hard to conclude much from that.
The complete report, which you can read here, has a bunch more interesting tidbits. For example:
None of this is intended to be definitive: it’s just one company sharing their experience. But it makes for interesting reading nonetheless, and might be a good reference for anyone in the market for a new hard drive.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.