Your Hard Drive is not Infallible...

Photo by Manuel Geissinger from Pexels

I consider our computer hard drives to be the filing cabinet of our electronic law office. My dad used to tell me stories of looking for similar past pleadings through the rows of filing cabinets in my grandfather's small law office to use as templates. Now we can keep a copy of almost our entire "paper" file in a piece of plastic slightly bigger than a deck of cards. This, in addition to the copy on our laptop or desktop computer. (Don't forget to make multiple backups! See my post on April 1, 2019: Help Prevent Your Law Office's Data Loss!

However, the reliability of these little pieces of plastics with multiple times more moving parts than an old, steel four-drawer filing cabinet has to be better scrutinized. We used to worry only about property insurance and making sure the filing cabinets were fire-resistant. Now we also have to worry about dropping hard disks or the computers they are housed in as they are frequently in motion. The good news is our hard drives appear to get better and better over time.

I came across this report from Backblaze (note I use Backblaze for "a" cloud back up of my office drive). Backblaze has a "farm" of hard drives for their clients. Their farm consists of hard drives from three leading providers, HGST (owned by Western Digital), Seagate, and Toshiba. The storage sizes of their drives range from 4 to 14 TB.

To ensure their clients don't lose data, they have multiple copies of their clients' files distributed throughout their data farm. This requires Backblaze to have over 100,000 disk drives (of various sizes). This provides Backblaze with a large data pool to obtain results. See the image below.

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https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/

HGST and Toshiba has the lowest Annual Failure Rate ("AFR") of less than 1%. While Seagate drives, appear to have an average of over 1% (with a range reaching as high as 2.67% and a low (only one type) reaching below 1%.

This is by no means a scientific test. But, it does give you some thought about what brand to buy the next time you need a hard drive. Meanwhile, be careful of those "cheaper" brands, as you may find yourself getting what you paid for - something that turns out cheap…

Podcast #1 (Part 1 of 3): Judge Herbert B. Dixon, Jr. (Ret.) - His observations from the Bench.

Judge Herbert B. Dixon, Jr. (Ret.) served two consecutive 15-year terms as a Judge for the Superior Court for the District of Columbia.  Judge Dixon is a columnist for The Judges’ Journal ABA magazine , chair of Superior Court’s Electronic Filing Pilot Project and a senior judicial adviser to the Center for Legal and Court Technology (formerly the Courtroom 21 Project), an initiative of the Marshall-Wythe Law School at the College of William & Mary and the National Center for State Courts.  Our discussion was so informative that I split the interview into three parts!  In Episode #1, Judge Dixon and I discuss how he has seen how attorneys' use of technology in the courtroom change over the years, effective use of slides and animations in the courtroom and what he sees as attorneys' technological proficiency today and in the future.

TSLP Podcast #1: Judge Herbert B. Dixon, Jr. (Ret.) - His observations from the Bench.

Michael D.J. Eisenberg

Judge Dixon

Presenting at the DC Bar's Annual "Practice 360°"

Show Note Links:

Judge Dixon’s Twitter handle is @Jhbdixon

My discussion of ABA Rules regarding a lawyers need for competence when dealing with technology.

DC Bar's Annual "Practice 360°" scheduled for May 15, 2020, in Washington, DC.

ABA Annual "Tech Show" scheduled for February 26 - 29, 2020, in Chicago, IL.

ABA The Judges’ Journal magazine.

The Tech Savvy Lawyer will be guest speaking at the D.C. Bar Association!

I’m going to be speaking in December at the D.C. Bar Association’s Small Firm Lunch and Learn Series. I’ll be sharing some tips and tricks to make your computer use a lot more efficient. This will help you be more productive in your practice, help your clients and maybe giving you a little more time in your personal life!

Even if you know all but “one” of the tips shared, if that “one” tip helps you save even more time, it will be well worth your attendance!

Register