WD lists their 2.5TB drive as having "Non-recoverable read errors per bits read" as "<1 in 10^14" and the drive has about 2 x 10^13 bits, so while the chance of an error in one whole disk read is non-trivial, it's not 100%.
Mirroring will still work fine as long as the error is detected. The chance of read errors in the exact same sector of two disks should still be small. Silent errors were always a problem for mirroring.
At what point do we as consumers start considering drives to be defective? Is the underlying ECC suffering because of the need to hit greater storage numbers?
It appears plainly that he wants to accept repsponsibility for the life and death of animals that he eats, and this may have been motivated by some third party that refuses to accept this.
I think when you have wealth without bounds the philosophical debates you have with yourself that usually end with "well, I just can't afford to that sort of experiment" no longer end that way.
There I stood in front the infernal machine. Crumbled, soggy paper in hand. It fell to pieces before I even had the thought to preserve it somehow. Sixteen random characters, gone in the wash. My thesis, gone in the wash. A decade, gone in the wash.
I could try to rewrite it. But I wouldn't even know where to start. Of course all my research was encrypted too! I'm no idiot! This was work, this was hard work. I'm not even sure I could remember it all. "I wrote them down in my diary so I wouldn't have to remember."
I did the calculation. Brute forcing the password would take more than my lifetime with all the machines in the lab. Would Moore save me? Could I stand the wait? Later on, I stood on the roof of the math building (a quiet escape a few grad students shared) contemplating my next move. Looking out, late at night, it came to me. I couldn't do it, but the they could. Even just a fraction of the computers out there could get me my thesis back.
But how? I could create a distributed computing project, it was something I had worked on before. But there was no way to attract the required users. I needed something as least as big as the largest projects that already existed. I needed to give people something. A bounty isn't enough, the prime project has a great bounty, but I need more users. They all want money. But I had no money. So, I gave them the next best thing: the promise of money.
There's an effort to archive the videos, similar to the one to download Yahoo's videos before they shut down. To check it out go to #googlegrapes on EFNet.
I was briefly looking for exactly this, after our lawyer suggested manually printing out thousands of emails and scanning to PDF. Luckily my encouragement to use a PST file finally won out. Not a confidence inspiring moment.