Tag Archive for: disks

Why Japan has ‘declared war’ on floppy disks (What’s that?)


Japan’s government has “declared a war on floppy disks”. Decades after the unwieldy magnetic storage disks became obsolete and were phased out globally, Japan’s digital ministry has announced that it will finally do away with floppy disks and other outdated technology in a bid to modernise its bureaucracy.

In a press conference this week, Japan’s digital minister Taro Kono said he was working towards moving administrative procedures online. “Digital Minister declares a war on floppy discs,” he tweeted in English earlier this week. “Digital Agency is to change those regulations so you can use online.”

Japan may be home to some of the world’s leading tech giants, but the Japanese have always had an affinity for older technology. According to a BBC report, cassettes were still widely used in 2015. Meanwhile, in 2019, the country’s cyber security minister publicly admitted that he had never used a computer in his life.

But first, what are floppy disks?

Popularly used between the 1970s and 1990s, a floppy disk is a removable disk storage device used to save computer data and programmes. If you haven’t used one, you most certainly have seen one on the top left corner of an MS Word document, where a small animated floppy disk acts as the save button.

The disk, first developed by IBM, is only able to store about 800 KB of data, which is about 0.0008 GB. To put that in perspective, today you can find hard drives with storage up to 20 TB (20,000 GB).

Since 2021, when Kono was administrative reform minister, he has been vocal about his disdain for the old-fashioned fax machine, a fixture in many Japanese government offices, and the hanko seal — an official seal that is used to sign contracts and documents. He directed government ministries to discontinue hanko requirements for several documents, including year-end tax adjustments and tax…

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Techie turns security guard to steal CPU, RAM and hard disks


A software engineer became a security guard in order to steal computer equipment and other valuables from CMR University and other places, police say.

Odisha native Raj Patra, 27, was arrested on August 21 by Bagalur police for stealing electronic equipment worth Rs 35 lakh between May 4 and May 11 this year during the lockdown. Among the things he stole were computer processors (CPUs), RAM and hard disks.

Police said Patra arrived in Bengaluru in 2018 and worked for various software companies. But he soon found that stealing was more lucrative and started working as a security guard. He would change jobs after every theft.

Patra joined the private-run CMR University in April and scoured each and every corner of its campus, including the security measures, within days.

In May, he used duplicate keys or sneaked through windows to enter the rooms where computers were stored. He dismantled important accessories and took them home. After the theft came to light, CMR University suspected Patra but he had vacated his rented home by then. The security agency that hired him didn’t have enough information about him either. But the police eventually tracked him down.

Police say they have recovered the computer equipment that Patra had sold off to service centres and online. He is also suspected to have been involved in at least one theft in Odisha.

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8TB disks seem to work pretty well, HGST still impressive

(credit: Alpha six)

Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has published its latest batch of drive reliability data. The release covers failure information for the 70,000 disks that the company uses to store some 250PB of data.

This is the first quarter that Backblaze has been using a reasonable number of new 8TB disks: 45 from HGST and 2720 from Seagate. Drives from both companies are showing comparable annualized failure rates: 3.2 percent for HGST, 3.3 percent for Seagate. While the smaller HGST drives show better reliability, with annualized failure rates below one percent for the company’s 4TB drives, the figures are typical for Seagate, which Backblaze continues to prefer over other alternatives due to Seagate’s combination of price and availability.

Annualized failure rates for all of Backblaze's drives.

Annualized failure rates for all of Backblaze’s drives. (credit: Backblaze)

But it’s still early days for the 8TB drives. While evidence for the phenomenon is inconclusive, hard drive reliability is widely assumed to experience a “bathtub curve” when plotting its failure rate against time: failure rates are high when the drives are new (due to “infant mortality” caused by drives that contain manufacturing defects) and when the drives reach their expected lifetime (due to the accumulated effects of wear and tear), with a period of several years of low failure rates in the middle. If the bathtub theory is correct, Backblaze’s assortment of 8TB drives should suffer fewer failures in the future.

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