Stats can be twisted

Exactly. My argument here is to be careful with published stats, because they’re easy to misinterpret, and they’re also easy to misrepresent.

Backblaze’s data is good, just be careful when making conclusions based on it.

weird stuff in the code

What code? We use a different runner for the model so we can run multiple different AI models, so the only thing we’re getting from DeepSeek is the model.

The failure rate is annualized, so age of drive is also factored into the consideration.

Sort of. If we’re mostly seeing failures during the first year or two and high average age, that means their QC is terrible, but that’s something a consumer can work with by burning in drives. If average age is lower, that means drives are probably failing further into their life, which means a burn-in won’t likely detect the worst of it.

If Seagate were so unreliable, why would Backblaze be using so much of them? They used to use cheap consumer drives in the past, but if you look at the drives they have in service, they’re pretty much all enterprise class drives, so it’s not like they’re abusing customer warranties or anything.

Here’s a survey of IT pros from 2019, which gives Seagate the award for every single category for Enterprise HDDs:

While the top two companies of Enterprise HDDs were close in all categories, Seagate has proven itself a leader by being voted Market for the seventh year in a row; also picking up titles for Price, Performance, Reliability, Innovation, and Service and Support, sweeping the board for a two-year streak. Western Digital came in second for all categories trailed by Toshiba.

Backblaze places Toshiba as first for reliability, whereas this survey put them third.

Why the discrepancy? Idk, but there’s a good chance Backblaze is doing something wonky in their reporting, or they have significantly different environmental factors in their datacenters or something than average. Or maybe they’re not burning in their drives (or counting those as failures) and other IT pros are (and not counting those as failures). Maybe their goal is to reduce demand so they can get the drives cheaper. I really don’t know.

I’m not going to tell you what you should buy. I personally have WD drives in my NAS because I got a decent price for them years ago, but I wouldn’t hesitate to put Seagate drives in there either. Regardless, I’m going to test the drives when I get them.

I like develop. Sounds nice and indicates things may be unstable.

You monster.

That doesn’t fix the problem here though, which is that a specific distribution source took it down.

If you want to fight Sony, go for it. If you ask for funding for a lawsuit, I’ll probably contribute. If you just redistribute over P2P, that’s cool too.

It’s an offering to Cthulhu.

Got some for my kids, they love them.

Yeah, we did that at my last company to make sure our hardware was up to spec. We deployed an IOT device for long term outdoor installations, so it needed to survive very hot temps. We had a refrigerator we gutted and added heat to, and we’d run a simulation with heavier than expected load for a couple days and tossed/RMAd the bad units.

That was a literal burn in, but the same concept ak applies to pretty much everything. If you build/buy a PC, test the hardware (prime95 CPU test, memtest for RAM, etc). Put it through its paces to work out the major bugs before relying on it so you don’t have to RMA a production system.

Yes, buy NAS or enterprise drives for a NAS, don’t buy consumer drives.

If you look at the data, Seagate is also some of their oldest drives, and some of their most used. Likewise, they have almost no WD drives, yet that’s what you recommend below.

I’m not saying you should or should not buy Seagate drives, I’m just saying that’s not what you should be taking away from that data. What it seems to say is that Seagate drives are more likely to fail early, and if they don’t, they’ll likely last a while, even in a use case like Backblaze. Some capacities should be also avoided.

That said, I don’t think this data is applicable to an average home user. If you’re running a NAS 24/7, maybe, but if you’re looking for a single desktop drive (esp if it’s solid state), it’s useless to you because you won’t be buying those models (though failure rates by capacity apply since they likely use the same platters).

I certainly think it’s cool, but the further you stray from the beaten path, the more newly janky it gets. I’m sure there’s a good workflow here, it’ll just take some time to find it.

That will take a few weeks most likely.

That said, there’s no way to verify what happens once the data leaves your machine, and the client isn’t that interesting. I certainly won’t trust any ai hosted by a third party because of that reason.

Exactly.

Also, none of the article applies if you run the model yourself, since the main risk is whatever the host does with your data. The model itself has no logic.

I would never use a hosted AI service, but I would probably use a self hosted one. We are trying a few models out at work and we’re hosting it ourselves.

We’re running it at work on a Mac mini with 64GB RAM (48GB for the GPU), and while it’s a little slow, it works fine.

We’re playing with it at work and I honestly don’t understand the hype. It’s super verbose and would take longer for me to read the output than do the research myself. And it’s still often wrong.

It’s cool I guess, and I’m still looking for a good use case, but it’s still a ways from taking over the world.

Exactly. If a company can be trusted to provide privacy respecting products, they’ll come with receipts to prove it. Likewise, if they claim something else respects or doesn’t respect privacy, I likewise expect receipts.

They did a pretty good job here, but the article only seems to apply to the publicly accessible service. If you download it and run it through your runner of choice, you’re good. A privacy minded individual would probably already not trust new hosted services.

I just looked and that seems surprisingly usable. I might just pick one up and mess with it.

Same. They just don’t do what I need on my phone. Hopefully that changes, but PinePhone HW kinda sucks (poor battery life and audio quality), and most of the other phones w/ Linux support have some pretty serious caveats.

I also went Graphene, and it’s privacy for me too.

I really don’t want Google Play Services running, and GrapheneOS gives me that option. I have three profiles:

1. main - no Google Play Services, most apps are from F-Droid
2. work - Google Play Services, and only the apps I need for work
3. “google” - Google Play Services, and only apps I need occasionally (e.g. Google Watch/Wallet, Maps, etc)

I spend 99% of my time on main, and most of the rest in “work” (need it for MFA). My phone reboots every 4 hours, so Google Play eventually stops running in the background (tried more frequently, and it was annoying).

There are other Android ROMs, but GrapheneOS has really rapid security updates, perhaps faster than anywhere else. The other projects are good too, it’s just the first I tried and I’ve liked it so far.