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(credit: Alpha six)

Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has published its latest batch of drive reliability data. The release covers failure information for the 70,000 disks that the company uses to store some 250PB of data.

This is the first quarter that Backblaze has been using a reasonable number of new 8TB disks: 45 from HGST and 2720 from Seagate. Drives from both companies are showing comparable annualized failure rates: 3.2 percent for HGST, 3.3 percent for Seagate. While the smaller HGST drives show better reliability, with annualized failure rates below one percent for the company's 4TB drives, the figures are typical for Seagate, which Backblaze continues to prefer over other alternatives due to Seagate's combination of price and availability.

Annualized failure rates for all of Backblaze's drives. (credit: Backblaze)

But it's still early days for the 8TB drives. While evidence for the phenomenon is inconclusive, hard drive reliability is widely assumed to experience a "bathtub curve" when plotting its failure rate against time: failure rates are high when the drives are new (due to "infant mortality" caused by drives that contain manufacturing defects) and when the drives reach their expected lifetime (due to the accumulated effects of wear and tear), with a period of several years of low failure rates in the middle. If the bathtub theory is correct, Backblaze's assortment of 8TB drives should suffer fewer failures in the future.

What boosts does the Xbox One S hide? According to Digital Foundry, quite a few. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

The Xbox One S is out, and our review discusses at length some of the system's major changes, including a total visual refresh and a test of its 4K content. Turns out we missed one thing: the system launched with an unadvertised boost to some older games' visuals!

The frame rate-analysis wizards at Eurogamer's Digital Foundry confirmed the good news after testing older Xbox One games. Many titles won't seen any boost at all—which is what we found in cursory testing of 15 games, both for the normal system and for its backwards-compatibility library. However, if an older game runs on Xbox One S using either unlocked frame rates (meaning, not tied to v-sync) or dynamic resolution (meaning, it can scale down from 1080p on the fly to improve performance), players might see the a boost by as much as nine frames per second.

That maximum boost was measured in Project CARS, a graphics-intensive driving sim whose rain-soaked racetrack variants can bring frame rates hurtling downward on the normal Xbox One. Other games that enjoyed noticeable boosts included a remaster of Capcom's Resident Evil 5 and the latest game in the Hitman series.

The world's first broadcast using 8K TV technology has begun on Japan's public channel NHK. With a resolution of 7680×4320, "Super Hi-Vision" as the company calls it—don't worry, the name won't catch on—has about four times the detail of a 4K broadcast, or 16 times what you're probably watching at home (normal HD, 1920×1080).

The 8K broadcast will be tested over the next five days, and from August 6 it will be used to broadcast parts of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, which are being filmed in 8K by special NHK cameras.

This shows you the relative resolution of 8K vs. 4K and HD.

Of course, viewing an 8K broadcast will be rather difficult even in Japan, as none of the equipment required to receive and display the 8K signal has yet been commercially released. Instead, NHK has set up two special 8K viewing theatres in Tokyo and Osaka for the duration of the trial. For really determined home users, Sharp apparently sells an 85-inch 8K TV for about £120,000, but I couldn't find it in stock anywhere.