Farming Hard Drives (2012)

Good times...

/stares wistfully off into the distance

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?

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).

Crashplan used to work well, but they decided they didn't want retail customers (and now apparently do again).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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...

Backblaze is a cloud storage company

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.)

I don't think it is immoral to purchase products from retail stores.

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.

I saw they attempted to pivot into corporate spyware and it hasn't done as well as they thought.

> 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.

Lol, good bait