Jovidah

I never understood all the hate for Vista. I've ran it on my i7 920 for something like 8 years and I never had any issues with it. I went to it from Windows XP and apart from disliking some of the cosmetic changes (whenever they move settings around or change control panels I get cranky and I always choose a legacy view mode if possible) I it always worked just fine for me. Don't know why people hated so much on it. 
IMO Windows ME (unstable mess that was worse than 98 SE in every way) and Windows 8 (bullshit counterintuitive tablet interface brought to PC) were far more deserving of hate.
 
Sure, Vista wasn't one of those monumental steps forward like Windows 95 or Windows XP, but it never felt like a step backwards to me either. Windows ME and Windows 8 certainly did.
 
Interestingly enough a lot of people mention that faulty hardware might be the case. A interesting example of this is how my parents completely hated Windows 7 and wanted to go back to Vista because their new Windows 7 laptop had issues where it kept freezing (due to a driver related issue). Maybe I just got lucky in that whole lottery?

Who knows, maybe nvidia 7 nm? 
While everyone's talking about AMD's 7 nm CPUs and GPUs it's not like nVidia has suddenly lost TSMC's phone number.  I can imagine one of the reasons the Turing timeline feels somewhat sped-up is that the 7nm is already in the works and not too far out. I doubt they want to find themselves in the same situation as intel... They may be greedy but they're not idiots. If AMD gets a proper and competitive 7nm GPU out of the door fast enough, that might result in a rather shortlived Turing generation.
I always thought Turing was a bad generation to upgrade, since it's usually the nodeshrinks (for example Maxwell to Pascall) that come with the most extra performance for your buck.
 
When it comes to intel... god knows if they finally get 10 nm to work, or whether they'll go straight to 7 nm. Though I doubt we'll see their 7 nm before 2020.
Who knows; if the GPUs were the problem with 10nm, maybe they'll try their hand at GPU-less high performance 10nm CPUs? The announced KF SKUs might be a prelude to that? 
I don't really see Optane breaking into the consumer space next year either, especially with the huge pricedrops on high performance nvme drives. The pricegap is only becoming larger.
 
I think monitors might be interesting next year, with HDR, 4k and high refreshrate monitors (and/or cominations thereof) all becoming more and more affordable and breaking into the mainstream. Although to be honest I am looking forward to some kind of standardization on ... some standard. There's just too many different choices and competing standards and resolutions right now.
 
I'm also quite interested in what Samsung is going to come up with to succeed the 860's and 970's. For years they've been dominant in the SSD market largely because of superior performance... but now that most competitors are closing the gap it begs the question whether they'll be able to one-up the competition once again. But who knows, maybe someone else will take the torch?
 
In general I think it's another bright year. The nodeshrink allows AMD to come out with actually exciting stuff, and if nothing else it's going to require a response from their competitors (whether in products or in price). Then there's projected pricedrops in SSDs, pricedrops in RAM and you're arguably looking at one of the best years to upgrade in ages.

Well to be fair it's something we're hardwired to do psychologically. Simplify into basic groups and classify them unidimensionally (identifying by only 1 group-membership we deem most important). It sucks but pretty much everyone does it.
But it's at the root of a lot of problems, and sadly still at the basis of a lot of policy.
There's a great book on this; Identity & Violence by Amartya Sen. Essentially a lot of the (ethnic) violence you see results from overfocus on a certain cleavage / difference between groups while forgetting about all the commonalities.  The whole concept of nationalism really relies on this selective amnesia and mental lazyness.
I honestly don't really know where the US should go from here. In a way it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle. I can sympathize with the longing for the older ways, but I'm not sure whether they're still applicable. You can try to withdraw from the world but I'm not sure how feasible that is given how the runaway train of globalization will just keep going. It's happening whether you like it or not, so you have to deal with it somehow.
 
The only real example I can think of that was very isolationist in the past was China. It really didn't do them any good. Even though they were ahead of the west for most of history in scientific & civic development, the isolation and xenophobia caused them to fall behind and become dominated by the western powers. 
A withdrawing US might very well simply fall behind, diminish & impoverish. I'd also worry about who'd step in to fill the vaccuum and what kind of world that'd leave us with. So I doubt it's good for anyone.
That being said I do agree it has to figure out the right solution to that balancing act.
 
 
I guess for most of us in the internet generation, the differences between the populations of any of the western countries really aren't that big. A lot of us really just consume the same media, same pop culture, communicate in the same language, etc. I'd dare say that 'people under 30' from different western countries have more in common, than the younger and older generations within the same country.
That's probably also why you see this huge disconnect in some of the recent elections. Brexit was really something only the older generations wanted. All the younger generations are on board with the globalization stuff, a more connected Europe, etc. 
Although admittedly I don't have any data to back this up (I'm no expert in criminology) I really doubt the death penalty (or any other harsh punishment) is a good deterrent. The problem is that most people comitting a crime aren't calculating whether advantage gained from the crime is worth the measurement of the punishment. Generally they just think they'll get away with it, won't get caught, and evade the punishment altogether. 
People generally tend to think 'that won't happen to me'.
 
It's entirely worthless in cases of political / ideological violence committed by idealists who are willing to sacrifice for their cause...
It does work wonders in stemming recidivism though.
 
Resorting to torture and that kind of thing? Only galvanizes the resistance. It's been tried. It ruins your counterinsurgency effort. Doing it on your own population only undermines the legitimacy of your government.

I'm not going to buy into the whole "Intel has no competition so they won't do anything" argument. It's compelling, but I don't buy it entirely. I look at other avenues like:
Frequency is a huge power hog. That's why 4.0GHz has been an effective road block for the past decade. Power dissipation per transistor has been simplified to P = CV^2f, but when f is a really large number compared to CV^2 and you have billions of transistors, that power adds up. On that note, Intel's design philosophy is supposedly no more than 1% increase in power dissipation per 2% IPC gains. Integration of components (like the FPU, L2 cache, and memory controller) helped a lot during the 90s and 2000s, and there's nothing really left to integrate in the CPU except the chipset and RAM. At that point, you'll just have an SoC. And it's unlikely RAM will be integrated into processors (Introducing the new Core i7-8700K with 8GB or 16GB of non-upgradeable RAM!) or the chipset for that matter (it would add a lot of pins) There hasn't been recent a breakthrough in front end management. Most of the processor die isn't taken up by execution units any more, it's taken up by the front-end in sorting instructions and such. There's only so much you can do there before any improvement becomes a colossal effort that's not worth it. The "final frontier" if you will in processor design is to simplify the front-end. NVIDIA and Elbrus are trying to get there but we'll see how far they get. The programs that most people use aren't even taxing anymore. Think about it, if I can watch YouTube on a phone whose power barely touches that of a processor made in say 2008, what makes anyone think a processor today will handle it appreciably faster? There is multithreading, but for most daily programs people use (web browser, email client, some office productivity program), spreading the workload across cores doesn't really work as well as you think because almost all of the time, they're waiting on something to happen.  

It's almost as if I've been telling this forum for months now that Kaby would not be bringing any IPC boosts. @patrickjp93 Are we going to chalk this up as another fake result? God knows the only accurate Kaby result is the GB team and their Geekbench outlier. After all, it's the only result that showed an improvement over Skylake in terms of IPC. Perhaps every single other Geekbench score AND Tom's third party review exists to paint a false narrative about Kaby's true performance.
 
Look on the bright side Patrick, at least you didn't have to wait until January to get the inevitable result of our arguments. 

I make it my duty to teach people if I correct them. I want them to understand my thought process, and I give them my methodology so that they can test it themselves. If their result matches mine, then great. If they produce a different result, or correct a flawed methodology on my part, then even better. It means I've learned something, and that is always a good thing. Simply telling someone they are wrong, or providing "facts" without context does nothing for anybody. People that believe others without questioning the "why" learn nothing. I always tell people to question what they do not understand, and not just take the words of someone that appears to be knowledgeable as an absolute fact. 
 
Once people fall prey to deceitfully articulate people, misinformation spreads like wildfire. It's no secret that Patrick knows many things, but it's an absolute fact that the majority of what he knows, has yet to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. 

Well I appload your persistence. My personal background is more in international relations / conflict / terrorism studies but I have to say I get really damn tired trying to correct the many misconceptions floating around in that area. 
It's hard and unrewarding work to try and fight misinformation...

Iraq 2003, Panama 1989 (and 1941), Grenada 1983, Vietnam 1960's-70's , Iran 1953 , Nicaragua 1900s-1920s, Honduras 1900s-1920s, Guatemala 1954. That's invasions and sponsored coups just in the last century... and that's just going from what I remember and easily cross-checked. There's a lot more. I know the US likes to selectively remember the events where they were 'the good guys' but if you go beyond the collective amnesia there's a lot more grey area. 
 
Yeah, you guys can be good friends... when you're European and anti-communist. A lot of areas of the world have experienced a US behaving less than benign...

Well most of the times when you were 'asked' to get involved that was really just  you working behind to scenes to make sure some local did. Let's face it. Vietnam wasn't about 'securing freedom', it was about containment of China.  Grenada was all about stopping a spread of Cuban influence. Panama was all about making sure the Panama canal wouldn't be nationalized. And the coups? Those were all of elected governments. The US has been one of the biggest threats to democratically elected regimes in the 20th century. All the meddling in central America in the early 20th century was all about securing business interests.
Most of the time, the US really only did something if it overlapped with their own interests. It only ever protected democracies when those democracies were friendly to them; if they weren't it never had any qualms about knocking them over. So yeah... for a lot of countries, the US has at times been a threat (even when they themselves weren't).
 
Now I'll freely admit that the US isn't a kingsize North Korea on steroids that only does bad. The US has showed moments of remarkable leadership when it was clearly trying to do good. WW2 is the best example of this, and I think the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo are also shining examples. Desert Storm - even when oil obviously was a factor - was likewise a justified effort, and notwithstanding the miserable outcome I think the intervention in Libya really was a well-intended effort within the R2P framework.
 
But that doesn't mean all the missteps can all so easily be forgotten.
I do agree there is a glaring lack of leadership in trying to prevent the humanitarian disasters we've seen over and over again when the world sits by watching just another conflict no one cares about. Europe watched for years as Yugoslavia tore itself apart. Same goes for Syria.
My criticism though is not for the few well-intended cases that ended bad (with Libya being the best example of that). My criticism is for all the cases when it went out of its way to invade a third world country or knock over a democratically elected regime. Or when it really made a bad situation a lot worse (Iraq 2003). The whole problem with jihadi extremists would have been over for years if it hadn't been for that invasion.
And yes I'm fully aware it's not alone in that; France and UK also continue to play neocolonial powerbroker. But that doesn't make it right.
Just don't go around claiming that you're not a threat to anyone... when there are too many countries who have good reasons to feel differently.
I agree there's no pleasing everyone. I do think though that it would have been possible to please far more people with just a few different strategic decisions. Especially in the last 15 years.
The main thing holding them back was logistics (it's a pretty damn big ocean); they couldn't even keep a handful of troops on the Aleutian islands supplied. Second... well after the battle of midway it was quite obvious they weren't going to gain the naval control required for any invasion. 
Well... no.. the US (nor any other country) stands for anyone who asks. It only stands for those who ask who have something to offer.
Routinely the governments have shown that even if the government asks, it prefers to deal with corrupt dictators. Neither does it really stand up to other countries for their actions unless it feels its own interests are threatened. It fully supported the 2006 invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia even though it tore apart the best chance for a legitimate functioning Somali government in 20 years. It's unlimited support for Israel, regardless of what it does or who it invades (it essentially wrecked Lebanon... several times), is the main reason that conflict still exists. 
 
Sure, the US occasionally does some good things but please spare me the high and mighty idealism talk. The overriding principle of US foreign policy has always been their own interest & power. Idealistic efforts and R2P-like interventions have really been the exception rather than the norm. Now I'm no hater of the US. Over here we've mostly been on the receiving end of some of the good things the US has done. But to just claim the record is all clean and all intentions were always good is just ludicrous.
 
Now about US-Muslim relations... there's no such concept. The only ones talking about Muslims as one group are Muslim radicals and Western writers with either an agenda or a complete lack of grasp on basic social concepts (Huntington?!).  About specific regimes... well it's really a mixed bag. It has had very good relations with a lot of regimes in muslim-majority countries (think Gulf states, Pakistan, Indonesia). Sadly it often found itself supporting these regimes against their own people, which is one of the main reasons that policy backfired and turned into the mess we have now.
If you go further back (19th century) I really don't think there were much relations with the exception of the few clashes with the Barbary states.
 
 

Okay that got awfully long. I can kind of see where you're coming from. Most people tend to talk in black & whites and claim the US is nothing but black. I can understand why that pushes you to claim it's white. My main point is that it's more...grey. I can live with light grey.
For all it flaws I do suppose the US is still the best candidate for the top power though. Europe has seriously dissapointed in the last 5 years - completely throwing all principles, idealism, international laws & norms out of the window when the going got a bit more though. Russia & China... well... they tend to make the US look like a nun. They don't even have any regard for their own citizens.

Err... no. The amount of arrests is quite sizable. But usually it doesn't make much more than a tiny headline, and convictions are usually on lesser charges (as they usually haven't actually managed to comit anything big). Now if you look at the amount of volunteers travelling to Syria, those are really sizable numbers. While not everyone in this group is to be considered a threat, a decent amount of them are. 
 
Admittedly, it's not an existential threat to a democracy. I can't really think of a whole lot of terror campaigns that ever brought down a country. But that doesn't mean it's a program that's easily ignored. The US already paid that price once and it caused 3000 deaths, and while I don't think their policies afterwards really made them any safer (only made it worse), at least they weren't ignoring the problem anymore.
Actually here in Europe, there are only select few politicians who actually try to scare the public. Usually the ones who have something to gain from it. Most mainstream politicians and institutions actually try to downplay its impact. They are quite aware that giving it too much attention only increases its influence and economic impact.
In France and Belgium sending the soldiers onto the streets wasn't meant to scare the public. It was mostly to assure the public and try to somehow try to get a grasp on problems they really did not have under control.
 
And define 'normal methods of intelligence and investigation'? One of the reasons they want all the high-tech metadata crap is because it works. If you want to know how well the 'traditional methods'  work, just look at older terror campaigns. They all lasted a lot longer and were a lot bloodier.
 
Again, I'm not trying to say this whole law is the best next thing since sliced bread or anything. But how on earth do you expect intelligence services to do their job if everyone keeps bringing up the bloody privacy argument at every turn? I get so bloody sick of it. Everyone always has their mouths full about privacy and how shit the government is, but never considers the other side of the coin. I dare you, next time there's a succesful attack, go call up the family of one of the victims, and tell them how hiding your dodgy porn habits are more important than the life of their son and daughter.
 
I don't like all this crap any better than any of you do, but at least try to realize that you can't have your cake and eat it too. I would like perfect privacy and perfect security to go hand in hand as well. It doesn't. I honestly don't know where to draw the line; that's up for public debate. But you cannot claim a right to total privacy and then deny the negative consequences that come with it.

Well there's the periodical hardware.fr reports. It's essentially the RMA rates from an unknown 'high volume supplier', and is updated every half year to show the results of the last 6 months. So to get a good idea you have to read a few of them. The advantage though is that it immediately illustrates the variability (with WD & Seagte often changing places within category between different reports). 
There are some caveats there as well though. They are blanket RMA rates, taking no regard of different usage of the products. So you'll see some expensive OC boards getting way more RMAs than some budget boards, which likely has more to do with the different usage than the quality of the product (people burning them down with overcloacking). NAS drives with failure rates close to normal desktop drives might be making far more hours. Etc. 
In essense, the numbers aren't necessarily comparable as the products might not have been treated equally. So it's best only to compare 'within category'.
 
There's also no mention of sample size, although they usually do filter the ones with few sells (as they'd too easily create outliers). Some products aren't sold enough so don't show up in the statistics; this makes it really difficult to judge & compare these.
 
Some things to take away from it: 
-WD & Seagate are usually comparable, and trading places in comparable categories
-Toshiba is consistently behind both in reliability
-Hitachi tends to win out there as well, though usually by a far smaller margin (and not as consistently)
-Differences between products / product lines can be larger than products between brands (so a blanket "go for this brand" statement is pointless)
-Usually, Red / NAS drives are more reliable
-Reliability can vary quite a bit between different capacities and models.
 
If you want to get anything from it I recommend you go through at least the last 5 editions.
And pretty much for any product, not just harddrives, my most important recommendation would be to compare specific products, not brands.
 
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/947-1/taux-retour-composants-14.html

Well there's the periodical hardware.fr reports. It's essentially the RMA rates from an unknown 'high volume supplier', and is updated every half year to show the results of the last 6 months. So to get a good idea you have to read a few of them. The advantage though is that it immediately illustrates the variability (with WD & Seagte often changing places within category between different reports). 
There are some caveats there as well though. They are blanket RMA rates, taking no regard of different usage of the products. So you'll see some expensive OC boards getting way more RMAs than some budget boards, which likely has more to do with the different usage than the quality of the product (people burning them down with overcloacking). NAS drives with failure rates close to normal desktop drives might be making far more hours. Etc. 
In essense, the numbers aren't necessarily comparable as the products might not have been treated equally. So it's best only to compare 'within category'.
 
There's also no mention of sample size, although they usually do filter the ones with few sells (as they'd too easily create outliers). Some products aren't sold enough so don't show up in the statistics; this makes it really difficult to judge & compare these.
 
Some things to take away from it: 
-WD & Seagate are usually comparable, and trading places in comparable categories
-Toshiba is consistently behind both in reliability
-Hitachi tends to win out there as well, though usually by a far smaller margin (and not as consistently)
-Differences between products / product lines can be larger than products between brands (so a blanket "go for this brand" statement is pointless)
-Usually, Red / NAS drives are more reliable
-Reliability can vary quite a bit between different capacities and models.
 
If you want to get anything from it I recommend you go through at least the last 5 editions.
And pretty much for any product, not just harddrives, my most important recommendation would be to compare specific products, not brands.
 
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/947-1/taux-retour-composants-14.html

I mention it at the end of the second paragraph. 
 
"They ommit things such as the age of the drives, the proximity of the drives, the temperatures they were running at, the case/rack revision they were mounted in and so on"
 
That was one of the biggest issues in their older testing. Backblaze had two or three different mounting systems, some of which didn't have any vibration dampening at all. 

Well there's the periodical hardware.fr reports. It's essentially the RMA rates from an unknown 'high volume supplier', and is updated every half year to show the results of the last 6 months. So to get a good idea you have to read a few of them. The advantage though is that it immediately illustrates the variability (with WD & Seagte often changing places within category between different reports). 
There are some caveats there as well though. They are blanket RMA rates, taking no regard of different usage of the products. So you'll see some expensive OC boards getting way more RMAs than some budget boards, which likely has more to do with the different usage than the quality of the product (people burning them down with overcloacking). NAS drives with failure rates close to normal desktop drives might be making far more hours. Etc. 
In essense, the numbers aren't necessarily comparable as the products might not have been treated equally. So it's best only to compare 'within category'.
 
There's also no mention of sample size, although they usually do filter the ones with few sells (as they'd too easily create outliers). Some products aren't sold enough so don't show up in the statistics; this makes it really difficult to judge & compare these.
 
Some things to take away from it: 
-WD & Seagate are usually comparable, and trading places in comparable categories
-Toshiba is consistently behind both in reliability
-Hitachi tends to win out there as well, though usually by a far smaller margin (and not as consistently)
-Differences between products / product lines can be larger than products between brands (so a blanket "go for this brand" statement is pointless)
-Usually, Red / NAS drives are more reliable
-Reliability can vary quite a bit between different capacities and models.
 
If you want to get anything from it I recommend you go through at least the last 5 editions.
And pretty much for any product, not just harddrives, my most important recommendation would be to compare specific products, not brands.
 
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/947-1/taux-retour-composants-14.html

Again yes and no.

 
I agree that, pure statistics-wise there is indeed no problem to have wildly different group sizes, as long as they hall hit a certain minimum level. So that's a yes.
But in this case some of the groups are simply too small (too few drives / too few drive hours) to give a representative measurement, given the low incidence of drive failures. IIRC that's an internal validity issue.
 
If all the numbers were multiplied by a 100, and all the drives had at least a few years under their belt I wouldn't have much of a problem with it. Right now there's a lot of capitalization on chance going on.
 
 

Even if you ignore the drive types they are using, the report is still flawed and not usable without additional information. For example, Backblaze has multiple revisions of their mounting solution, the older ones don't have vibration dampening. For all we know, the drives with the high failure rates were in their old mounting system and the ones with low failure rates are in their new systems. Without that information, the failure rates are useless for any comparison or reliability statistics. 

Actually, they can, as long as they do what they do instead of what they should  Ok, if the incidence is low enough 200 will be to low to reasonably detect it, that is true. But as @Jovidah said, if you had 34kk and 300k it would be fine despite the different order of magnitude in the number of observations. [And now there should be a new paragraph, but half the message gets deleted if I press enter. Surely the forum, Chrome, or both, is broken AF]. The other problem is you need a much lower number of observations for unconditional rates (what they report) than for controlling for other factors (as they should do, since not all drives are used in the same conditions). The third problem is that in all cases, whatever they do and whether they compute something useful or not, they should report the standard errors, or the 95% confidence interval, or something. That's all we would need to be able to tell whether a particular failure rate can be considered statistically different from another. Again, assuming any of those numbers are a meaningful estimate of failure rates (actually, under their assumption -that nothing needs to be controlled for- we can probably recover the standard errors from the information they provided). [insert enter, again] So you are right in the end, but the difference in sample sizes is not the problem. The lack of any reporting on precision is.

The problem is that all the conditions in the 'test' preclude a fair comparison between them. They have them under different conditions; different types of mounting pods, with differences in vibration dampening between the pods and even differences in temperatures within the pods. The actual drives were a complete mix and in earlier years contained drives ripped out of external storage enclosures, refurbished models, RMA's, and stuff in all different ages. Their methodology of measurement sucks the big one as well, and compares drives with wildly different drive ages (meaning you're comparing  a group op drives just 3 months old with a group that is 4 years old), and many groups of drives are far too small (leading to a very low unreliability of the acutal numbers).
 
Long story short, the methodology is so incredibly flawed that the numbers are completely meaningless.
Had they:
-bought large batches of brand-new drives, straight from manufacturer, at the same time (several thousand for each model at a minimum)
-put them under equal conditions in equal mounting solutions in equal pods etc etc
-ran them all for 5 years under the exact same stress and workload

Then I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. Although the results would still be fairly unrepresentative of actual usage. So they'd still be pointless, but at least they'd be reliable. Now they are anything but.
As mentioned above... at least Furmark is a 'fair' test; it just puts everything at 100%. This test is the equivalent of putting 50 different videocards in 50 different cases with 50 different cooling solutions, then running a Furmark at 50 different levels of performance / intensity settings, and then using that to claim which card is best.
It's simply not a consistent / fair test. It's predictive value is exactly zero.
Again, due to the wildly different treatment, it is impossible to claim anything at all about any drive. Although I do agree that there can be sizable differences between different models, or lines, of the same brand. Just claiming one brand is 'superior' is usually flawed.
What google does is their business. This report is flawed as fuck. Regardless of what you want to apply it to. It's not even applicable to server scenarios, as too much information is missing, and many groups are too small.
Agreed. This suspicion is reinforced by how their 'patterns' are very far off from the hardware.fr numbers. 
Even the drives within the same pod aren't even operating under the same condition.
If anyone's interested I think there was an article on tweaktown that tackled it in some detail a while back (just google it).
 
The WD Red drive that sees 11,31% failure at Backblaze? 1,5% at hardware.fr...
 
As I said, the problem is not just that the type of testing isn't representative of home usage... the problem is that their 'worst case scenario' isn't equalized for all the drives, so any results for it might be as much because of the conditions than due to differences between the drives. 

No it isn't worth it over the other SSDS.
 
That said, of the cheaper value SSD's the MX300 is generally the best.

LOL Kingston over samaung. I want what your smoking 

You should take their reports as accurate, but it should not be used as a reliability or quality reference for drives. I doubt they're manipulating any data or similar for their reports, they're just transparent about their drive usage. 
 
You should take the reports seriously in the sense of that's their drive failure rate for their specific use case. That's it really, it shouldn't be applied to any other data or use case. 
 
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying Backblaze is a bad company or anything. From what I know, they're reliable in terms of data integrity and redundancy, they just take a different approach to a lot of companies when it comes to drive choices. They go for cheap drives and replace them often rather than going for more expensive drives that don't need to be replaced as often. This will work out cheaper for them and makes the initial cost of capacity expansion smaller, due to them not having to buy a bunch of expensive datacentre drives. 
 
The only issue I have is when their drive failure reports are reported as reliability statistics or used as such, like they have been in the past. I think their 2013-2014 reports and graphs are a big part of the reason Seagate has a reputation as being unreliable, even though it is not true. 

As in, a single model can have certain drives that are more prone to failing due to using different brands of components. Eg. Samsung HA250JC are more likely to have the control board die if it has ESMT chips on it, while HA250JC are less likely to have it die if Samsung chips were used (the control boards can be switched between HDD BTW despite the different chips-hence I've still got 3x working HA250JC out of 4, instead of just 2).
 
They were known to be worse due to the control boards being very easy to damage/dying easily. I replaced the control board on my long "dead" 420MB Maxtor HDD last year, and its working like new again (I'm modifying Windows XP so that it can be installed on it, with only the drivers that match the hardware it would be used with for example)
 
Edit: I've got shitloads of HDD from Seagate, Western Digital, Quantum and Maxtor that just need the control boards replaced. The only drive with mechanical failure is one of the HA250JC that I bought second hand on Ebay.
 

Don't know about the other services, but at least with dropbox it stores everything on the actual disk. So if you're offline you still have everything, and it'll just synchronize later.

Google drives also stores it on the disk, and it syncs with online cloud storage so you can also view them online by loggin into google. i think hotmail also do the same thing with OneDrive. Pretty convenient for college work as its free and doc and pdf doesn't takes much space.