Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families' reliability isn't worth it if you're dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a 'good' price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.

B key vs M key. Laptop likely needs a SATA M.2 using B or B+M keying, you have a PCIe x4 drive with M keying.

I didn't realise it was possible to hate every side of an argument this strongly.

Bear in mind also that the extra weight and possibly aerodynamic compromises actually reduce range. In some cases, particularly at night, in poor weather, and at high speed, the panels would be a net negative.

They would only be useful if your car sat around in the sun for long periods without access to a charger.

Things might be different in the US, but here in NZ the first meter or two off the road is usually road reserve, which is council property. That's where footpaths/sidewalks, street trees, and utilities are run.

The bit of your driveway that is actually yours doesn't start until about where your front fence is, if you have one.

Boeing and Microsoft: same shit, different cloud.

It appears that the door design is unchanged from the previous generation.

The problem is not with any specific part of the design or any model of plane. Grounding the Max again will not help past fixing this specific fault.

It is the fundamental corporate culture. The same poor QA, both in design and production, affects all current Boeing aircraft.

Not sure if sarcastic...

Fibre optics can be used to measure a remarkable number of properties.

The electrical transmission industry makes significant use of fibreoptic current sensors, and distributed fibreoptic temperature sensors.

The latter is particularly useful as you can measure the temperature at any point along the fibre's length, allowing you to detect hot-spots in cables.

Cicadas are pretty loud; I'm sure you can pick up much quieter things with a fibreoptic microphone.

No, I think that one's fairly common. So is just "Republican gets pregnant, now supports abortion - but only for her specific circumstances".

The point of eradication is that once a disease is gone, you don't need to vaccinate against it any more. You've probably never been vaccinated against smallpox, for example.

If the cost per TB is the same and they're buying tens of PBs anyway, large commercial customers want fewer, bigger drives. That means fewer slots in servers, fewer storage controllers, and possibly even fewer servers.

Onboard storage on cellphones is all about how much they can charge and how many they can sell. 256GB extra for $200 is about 10x higher than the $100/TB flash storage can be gotten for.