Hard drive longevity and you (or your business)

Dave Farquhar Hardware

I can’t believe I’ve never written about the Backblaze hard drive longevity study, but apparently I haven’t. At work we’re running up against the limitations of hard drives, so it’s good to know this kind of stuff.

Here’s what you need to know: Hard drives fail very early or very late. If a drive lasts more than a few days–which is why burning in new equipment is important–only 5% of them fail in their first 18 months. Then, for the next 18 months, only 1.5% fail. Golden years! At age 3, though, failure rates jump to 11.8% and stay there. So keeping hard drives much longer than 4 years is generally asking for trouble. 78% of drives live to age 4, but at that age the annual failure rate is very high.

This is Backblaze’s experience under specific and somewhat peculiar conditions, but it’s not far off at all from what I’ve observed.

Keep in mind this is the average. Every maker has made incredibly bad drives, and all of them who are left have made drives better than the average too. I don’t know why they go on hot and cold streaks, but they do, and they always have. That’s why some people think any given brand of drives are the best and others think the same brand are junk. With a little luck, you can buy one brand of drive and have all of them be spectacular, or with a little bad luck, buy different models of the same brand and have them all fail a day after the warranty expires. Read more

Listen to this if you think a router makes you invincible

Dave Farquhar security , , , ,

One myth that I hear over and over is that having a router on your Internet connection makes you invisible, and makes you somehow invincible. I even heard someone say recently that if you have a router/firewall, you don’t need to run antivirus software.

Security researcher HD Moore appeared last week on Risky Business and he talked about ways that entire classes of routers can be compromised. Give it a listen. Read more

The Tampa Post on “Windows Service Center” scams

Dave Farquhar scams , ,

The Tampa Post’s technology Q&A columnist received a letter this weekend (toward the bottom of the link) about Windows tech support scammers. From the article:

The people performing the hoax sound remarkably professional and officious.

Depending on what you say to them, results vary a lot. When they call me, they’re anything but professional. Especially lately. They seem to be OK when they don’t think they’re talking to a computer professional. Mention that you do this for a living, that you have an advanced certification, or that you wrote a book, and they turn vicious fast. Read more

Linux is unrelated to extremism

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , , ,

The NSA’s spying on Linux Journal readers is precisely what’s wrong with NSA spying. Why? It paints with an overly broad brush.

Eric Raymond’s views on many things are on the fringes of what’s considered mainstream, but he’s not the kind of person who blows up buildings to try to get his point across.

And here’s the other problem. Does Eric Raymond even represent the typical Linux Journal reader? Odds are a sizable percentage of Linux Journal readers are system administrators making $50,000-ish a year, or aspiring system administrators who want to make $50,000-ish a year, who see knowing Linux as a means to that end.

It’s no different from targeting Popular Mechanics readers because someone could use information it publishes in ways you don’t agree with. Read more

Why you can’t get a $50 replacement sound/control board for your modern Lionel train

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , ,

Every so often, some people start raging on the train forums, or even in the pages of the magazines, about modern electronics in modern O gauge trains. The modern electronics make the model trains sound just like real trains, but eventually heat and power surges take their toll, the board goes poof, and now that $2,000 toy train doesn’t work anymore and needs a $300 replacement circuit board.

And by the time that happens, that $300 replacement circuit board might be out of production, and no longer available at any price.

Which has led to countless calls for some enterprising hobbyist to become a multimillionaire by inventing a $50 replacement board that works on every train.

There are several reasons for the situation. Read more

Be careful about cheap phone/tablet chargers

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

Consumerist has a sad story about a woman who was electrocuted by a cheap USB charger. The danger seems greater in countries that use 230 volts around that house rather than 115 like the United States, but even 115 volts can be dangerous if it crosses a vital organ.

A charger’s job is to take the higher AC voltage that comes from the wall and convert it to 5 volts DC to power the phone or tablet plugged into it. Poor design or poor manufacturing can cause the wall voltage to go where the converted voltage is supposed to. Literally, getting the wires crossed in this situation is very dangerous.

The solution is to be careful where you’re buying your chargers. Don’t buy them out of the back of a van, and don’t buy them from the dollar store. Get a charger made by a company you’ve heard of, and look for a regulatory logo on it. Approved products sold in the United States generally will bear a UL (Underwriter Laboratories) logo on them, while approved produces for the European Union will bear a CE (Conformité Européenne–European Conformity) logo.

I agree that many chargers are greatly overpriced, but there are reasonably priced, safe third-party chargers available too, such as the Amazon Basics USB charger, which costs around $9. Some stores have their own house brand that are similarly priced. Even at $9, there’s a comfortable profit margin for the retailer.

The difference an SSD makes

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

Back in the spring I bought a used computer. My wife wanted one, and while I probably could have cobbled something together for her, I didn’t have any extra Windows 7 licenses. So I bought a home-built Pentium D-based machine with Windows 7 on it from an estate sale for $70. The Windows license is worth that, so it was like getting the hardware for free.

When I got the hardware home to really examine it, it turned out not to be quite as nice as I initially thought. It was a fairly early Socket 775 board, so it used DDR RAM and had an AGP slot, limiting its upgrade options. The system ran OK, but not great, and it was loud.

The hard drive was a 160 GB Western Digital IDE drive built in 2003. That’s an impressive run, but a drive that old isn’t a good choice for everyday use. It’s at the end of its life expectancy and it’s not going to be fast. This weekend I got around to replacing it with an SSD. Read more

Rick Broida thinks he doesn’t use antivirus software

Dave Farquhar security , , , ,

C’mon. You knew I’d get around to writing a response to Rick Broida’s claim that he doesn’t use antivirus software.

Actually, he’s not nuts. But he’s also mistaken if he thinks he doesn’t use antivirus software. His editorial is kind of like saying, “I don’t use a web browser. I use Internet Explorer.”

Although he’s mistaken that he doesn’t use antivirus software, and not all of his advice is spot-on, you can do a lot worse than follow his advice.

Read more