Blasphemous technical writing

This is so, so, so wrong! I want to hold back but I can’t hold back no more!

This article from Petapixel appeared in my daily news feed last week. When I saw the title “Seagate performed best in Backblaze’s 2020 Hard Drive Failure Report“, I literally jumped. My immediate thoughts were “This can’t be right“.

Labelling Seagate as the best performer in a Backblaze report not only sounded oxymoronic. It was moronic. For those of us who have the industry experience, we know enough that this cannot be true with just a one fell swoop statement.

Petapixel misleading article title

Backblaze report

Backblaze has been releasing Hard Drive Stats and Report every quarter since 2013. For many of us practitioners, the report has been the de facto standard and indicator of hard disks reliability. Inadvertently, it defines the quality of the hard disk drives associated with the respective manufacturer’s brand and models.

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