5 ms·

> The last model, the 802.11ac numbered A1470, is now more than three years old, and the risks of its hard disk failing are climbing every day I'm increasingly

> The last model, the 802.11ac numbered A1470, is now more than three years old, and the risks of its hard disk failing are climbing every day I'm increasingly disillusioned with this world of hardware costing hundreds of dollars being considered geriatric at 3 years old. Requiring constant replacements mean that you don't really own anything, you're renting your whole life. And since new hardware only supports new software, it keeps you stuck on the software treadmill too. The article isn't wrong, it's a real problem of cheap mechanical drives. But it's not okay.

beermonster 5y ago
You can always replace the disks. Other than issues around the firmware no longer being updated, putting a new HDD in is not hard. Lots of guides online as referenced in this article
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dijit 5y ago
> it's a real problem of cheap mechanical drives. Fair. But the drives in time capsules are not cheap (not the most expensive either, but certainly not cheap).
908B64B197 5y ago
> I'm increasingly disillusioned with this world of hardware costing hundreds of dollars being considered geriatric at 3 years old. Requiring constant replacements mean that you don't really own anything, you're renting your whole life. HDDs have always been considered a wearable part. SSDs are better but their lifespan also has a limit. It's actually a selling point for things like OneDrive, operating your own file share has costs too, might as well shift these capex to opex. > And since new hardware only supports new software, it keeps you stuck on the software treadmill too. Part of the reasons is supporting older hardware requires back-porting changes. Or having N different versions of the same product in flight at all times. There's a good reason some businesses are moving toward SaaS.
- prepend 5y ago
  I have lots of plate hard drives that are 10+ years old. And I have a few that are in boxes that are 20 years old that I still end up using every once in a while. Yes they are mechanical and will eventually fail but three years for an HDD is not a good trend.
  - genewitch 5y ago
    Do you remember when consumer drives had three year warranties? The good ol' days. I haven't lost a spindle since I started using UPS to prevent voltage sags. Power outages make drive heads retract very fast, but a series of brown outs or 70VAC being put down the line used to cause me so much grief.
    - prepend 5y ago
      I remember when even the el cheapos in Frys had 5 year warranties. Hitachi umtrastars still have 5 year warranties but are harder to get for non-commercial uses.
BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
> The last model, the 802.11ac numbered A1470, is now more than three years old...considered geriatric at 3 years old That model was released in 2013. The very last one ever made is more than three years old, but the rest are on average much older.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  OOohhh...eight year old hardware. Spoooky! Carefully, now, put that in a museum! Seriously, though, we need to rethink the expected lifetime of products we buy. I live in a relatively new house for my neighborhood, it was built in 1972. I drive a 2008 Toyota. My desk has a sticker under it from 1993. The lamp over my head has a new-ish LED bulb in it, but the casting and glass are from the 1950s. My computer is a workstation from 2012, with a couple larger sticks of RAM and a pair of large SSDs it's as good as or better than most new machines. My phone is 2 years old now with no signs of wear, previously I had an LG G5 with a trivially swappable battery but the connectors and clips that held the modular design together wore out and LG stopped selling the OEM batteries. Some of this disposable product culture results from obsolescence, tech is getting better and while my old Crestoloy wrench is just as good as new tool steel a router or hard drive from a decade ago is not as good as a new one, that's reasonable. What's unreasonable is that a three-year warranty, or mechanical designs that wear out in slightly more than that, is considered acceptable. And why, when the product does wear out, is it glued and clipped together in ways that make it unrepairable?
  - lolwut125 5y ago
    They’re built to the best of our ability with materials we can build. It’s not like “oh, we can build them better but that’ll eat into next quarters profits”. Most of these devices are literally the pinnacle of what we can reliably crank out in number. If someone made an immortal hard drive, they’d be FUCKING RICH, because every elevator control system that gets forgotten about in a wall somewhere and industrial process control system would pay whatever it cost to just handle that.
  - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
    I think your diatribe here is misplaced. We're talking about failing spinning backup drives. They spin thousands of times per minute and move with micrometer precision. They're not stationary lumps of metal or stationary lumps of glass. And they're replaceable without much effort by newer technology that has no moving parts. > with a pair of large SSDs Great! So replace the drive in your time capsule with an SSD exactly like the article proposes too! Holy moly.
gruez 5y ago
>I'm increasingly disillusioned with this world of hardware costing hundreds of dollars being considered geriatric at 3 years old. Requiring constant replacements mean that you don't really own anything, you're renting your whole life. So... like most things in life? Off the top of my head: * house: you're either renting it or paying property tax/maintenance on it * car: maintenance * food: you can only eat it once! * smartphones: battery wears out
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Information record media itself should be durable. Digital informatioin storage has represented a compromise between speed and flexibility of access against durability of media. It stands in marked contrast with numerous other examples. Commercial CDs last decades --- I have several which are among the first produced in the mid-1980s, which still play perfectly. Vinyl and shellac records go back 60--100+ years. I've numerous decades-old books and at least one volume within easy reach dating to 1897, I suspect there are older in the house. With suitable preservation, paper books last centuries and there are extant copies of the first moveable-type texts ever printed, over 500 years old. Papyrus and clay tablets date back millennia. We can do better than three years. A suitable durable digital archival format is badly needed.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Commercial CDs last decades > Vinyl and shellac records go back 60--100+ years >decades-old books and at least one volume within easy reach dating to 1897 These aren't comparable to hard drives because they're all mass produced copies of a master. Hard drives can be arbitrarily written with whatever data you desire. >We can do better than three years tapes? optical discs? they last longer than hard drives, but have other trade-offs.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Handwritten notes on paper are not, the last I checked, mass produced, yet can survive centuries to millennia, with proper care. On durable digital media, you'd need something that's writable at least once, and then remarkably inert. There've been some proposals for data cubes or crystals which look as if they might fit that bill, such as Microsoft's Project Silica: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil... Whether that's intended to be (or can be adapted) for home / small office use isn't clear. Magneto-optical storage seems to be pretty robust, but after a brief heyday in the late 1990s, has disappeared off my radar. I'm not finding any current product offerings, and Wikipedia seems to confirm this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive Tape has supported longer duration storage, but still is mostly limited to a few decades. Delamination and demagnitisation are both problems. Paper in the form of punched cards, punched tape, or print-encoded paper digital storage (I've run across a reference to this) are actually ... among the more durable if less dense options out there. They're far from ideal, but might back at least some forms of storage. Some CDROM formats claim 10,000 year potential, though you need to know what you're looking for: Write-once BD-R HTL (High To Low) can last for 100 to 150 years given a relatively mild environment—i.e., not on your dashboard in Phoenix. Milleniatta’s M-Disc BD-R and DVD+R write-once discs use an even more stable data layer that is rated for 10,000 years. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2984597/hard-core-data-preservation-the-best-media-and-methods-for-archiving-your-data.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2984597/hard-core-data-prese... Most of the interesting work here is probably with libraries and archivalists. The US Library of Congress has some pages on CD-R / DVD-4 longevity: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd-r_dvd-r_rw_longevity.html https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd-r_dv... There's a UNESCO project: https://www.unesco.org/archives/multimedia/subject/14/Digital+Archiving+Project https://www.unesco.org/archives/multimedia/subject/14/Digita... But I'm coming up thin on solid suggestions or research.
busymom0 5y ago
My Time Capsule failed this week and it's around 8 years old too. Just yesterday, I followed this tutorial to replace the built in hard drive with a 1TB SSD instead: https://youtu.be/lHj9zWKve08 https://youtu.be/lHj9zWKve08 Now my Mac is able to back up to it again. Only problem I see is a warning on the Airport Utility which says "This device may be overheating" but I am not sure why. It seems to be running okay.
- skhr0680 5y ago
  It sounds the same as the iMac temperature sensor that only worked properly with Apple drives. You can ignore it.

beermonster 5y ago

You can always replace the disks. Other than issues around the firmware no longer being updated, putting a new HDD in is not hard. Lots of guides online as referenced in this article

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dijit 5y ago

> it's a real problem of cheap mechanical drives. Fair. But the drives in time capsules are not cheap (not the most expensive either, but certainly not cheap).

908B64B197 5y ago

> I'm increasingly disillusioned with this world of hardware costing hundreds of dollars being considered geriatric at 3 years old. Requiring constant replacements mean that you don't really own anything, you're renting your whole life. HDDs have always been considered a wearable part. SSDs are better but their lifespan also has a limit. It's actually a selling point for things like OneDrive, operating your own file share has costs too, might as well shift these capex to opex. > And since new hardware only supports new software, it keeps you stuck on the software treadmill too. Part of the reasons is supporting older hardware requires back-porting changes. Or having N different versions of the same product in flight at all times. There's a good reason some businesses are moving toward SaaS.

prepend 5y ago
I have lots of plate hard drives that are 10+ years old. And I have a few that are in boxes that are 20 years old that I still end up using every once in a while. Yes they are mechanical and will eventually fail but three years for an HDD is not a good trend.
- genewitch 5y ago
  Do you remember when consumer drives had three year warranties? The good ol' days. I haven't lost a spindle since I started using UPS to prevent voltage sags. Power outages make drive heads retract very fast, but a series of brown outs or 70VAC being put down the line used to cause me so much grief.
  - prepend 5y ago
    I remember when even the el cheapos in Frys had 5 year warranties. Hitachi umtrastars still have 5 year warranties but are harder to get for non-commercial uses.

BugsJustFindMe 5y ago

> The last model, the 802.11ac numbered A1470, is now more than three years old...considered geriatric at 3 years old That model was released in 2013. The very last one ever made is more than three years old, but the rest are on average much older.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago
OOohhh...eight year old hardware. Spoooky! Carefully, now, put that in a museum! Seriously, though, we need to rethink the expected lifetime of products we buy. I live in a relatively new house for my neighborhood, it was built in 1972. I drive a 2008 Toyota. My desk has a sticker under it from 1993. The lamp over my head has a new-ish LED bulb in it, but the casting and glass are from the 1950s. My computer is a workstation from 2012, with a couple larger sticks of RAM and a pair of large SSDs it's as good as or better than most new machines. My phone is 2 years old now with no signs of wear, previously I had an LG G5 with a trivially swappable battery but the connectors and clips that held the modular design together wore out and LG stopped selling the OEM batteries. Some of this disposable product culture results from obsolescence, tech is getting better and while my old Crestoloy wrench is just as good as new tool steel a router or hard drive from a decade ago is not as good as a new one, that's reasonable. What's unreasonable is that a three-year warranty, or mechanical designs that wear out in slightly more than that, is considered acceptable. And why, when the product does wear out, is it glued and clipped together in ways that make it unrepairable?
- lolwut125 5y ago
  They’re built to the best of our ability with materials we can build. It’s not like “oh, we can build them better but that’ll eat into next quarters profits”. Most of these devices are literally the pinnacle of what we can reliably crank out in number. If someone made an immortal hard drive, they’d be FUCKING RICH, because every elevator control system that gets forgotten about in a wall somewhere and industrial process control system would pay whatever it cost to just handle that.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  I think your diatribe here is misplaced. We're talking about failing spinning backup drives. They spin thousands of times per minute and move with micrometer precision. They're not stationary lumps of metal or stationary lumps of glass. And they're replaceable without much effort by newer technology that has no moving parts. > with a pair of large SSDs Great! So replace the drive in your time capsule with an SSD exactly like the article proposes too! Holy moly.

gruez 5y ago

>I'm increasingly disillusioned with this world of hardware costing hundreds of dollars being considered geriatric at 3 years old. Requiring constant replacements mean that you don't really own anything, you're renting your whole life. So... like most things in life? Off the top of my head: * house: you're either renting it or paying property tax/maintenance on it * car: maintenance * food: you can only eat it once! * smartphones: battery wears out

dredmorbius 5y ago
Information record media itself should be durable. Digital informatioin storage has represented a compromise between speed and flexibility of access against durability of media. It stands in marked contrast with numerous other examples. Commercial CDs last decades --- I have several which are among the first produced in the mid-1980s, which still play perfectly. Vinyl and shellac records go back 60--100+ years. I've numerous decades-old books and at least one volume within easy reach dating to 1897, I suspect there are older in the house. With suitable preservation, paper books last centuries and there are extant copies of the first moveable-type texts ever printed, over 500 years old. Papyrus and clay tablets date back millennia. We can do better than three years. A suitable durable digital archival format is badly needed.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Commercial CDs last decades > Vinyl and shellac records go back 60--100+ years >decades-old books and at least one volume within easy reach dating to 1897 These aren't comparable to hard drives because they're all mass produced copies of a master. Hard drives can be arbitrarily written with whatever data you desire. >We can do better than three years tapes? optical discs? they last longer than hard drives, but have other trade-offs.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Handwritten notes on paper are not, the last I checked, mass produced, yet can survive centuries to millennia, with proper care. On durable digital media, you'd need something that's writable at least once, and then remarkably inert. There've been some proposals for data cubes or crystals which look as if they might fit that bill, such as Microsoft's Project Silica: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil... Whether that's intended to be (or can be adapted) for home / small office use isn't clear. Magneto-optical storage seems to be pretty robust, but after a brief heyday in the late 1990s, has disappeared off my radar. I'm not finding any current product offerings, and Wikipedia seems to confirm this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive Tape has supported longer duration storage, but still is mostly limited to a few decades. Delamination and demagnitisation are both problems. Paper in the form of punched cards, punched tape, or print-encoded paper digital storage (I've run across a reference to this) are actually ... among the more durable if less dense options out there. They're far from ideal, but might back at least some forms of storage. Some CDROM formats claim 10,000 year potential, though you need to know what you're looking for: Write-once BD-R HTL (High To Low) can last for 100 to 150 years given a relatively mild environment—i.e., not on your dashboard in Phoenix. Milleniatta’s M-Disc BD-R and DVD+R write-once discs use an even more stable data layer that is rated for 10,000 years. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2984597/hard-core-data-preservation-the-best-media-and-methods-for-archiving-your-data.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2984597/hard-core-data-prese... Most of the interesting work here is probably with libraries and archivalists. The US Library of Congress has some pages on CD-R / DVD-4 longevity: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd-r_dvd-r_rw_longevity.html https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd-r_dv... There's a UNESCO project: https://www.unesco.org/archives/multimedia/subject/14/Digital+Archiving+Project https://www.unesco.org/archives/multimedia/subject/14/Digita... But I'm coming up thin on solid suggestions or research.

busymom0 5y ago

My Time Capsule failed this week and it's around 8 years old too. Just yesterday, I followed this tutorial to replace the built in hard drive with a 1TB SSD instead: https://youtu.be/lHj9zWKve08 https://youtu.be/lHj9zWKve08 Now my Mac is able to back up to it again. Only problem I see is a warning on the Airport Utility which says "This device may be overheating" but I am not sure why. It seems to be running okay.

skhr0680 5y ago
It sounds the same as the iMac temperature sensor that only worked properly with Apple drives. You can ignore it.