Farming Hard Drives (2012)
10 comments
·October 16, 2025philipwhiuk
fwipsy
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
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.
MarkusWandel
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
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.
gadders
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
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
Crashplan used to work well, but they decided they didn't want retail customers (and now apparently do again).
atYevP
Good times...
/stares wistfully off into the distance
null
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.