Even good manufacturers are subject to getting a lot of bad parts. It
happened to Dell a few years ago when they built a bunch of motherboards
using defective capacitors shipped by a normally good supplier. Other
companies got the same stuff. Dell eventually figured it out... but
shipped the bad motherboards anyhow... leading to a high early failure
rate and lawsuits.
Chuck Norcutt
Ken Norton wrote:
> Since we're on the subject of hard-drives and reliability...
>
> I've got a Barracuda 7200.8 250GB drive that has failed. In doing a
> little research I've found that this particular unit has a larger than
> average failure rate. Wouldn't bother me too much, as there is a
> warranty, except there are files on there I need. It just happens that
> my CDR backups for several important files have gone bad. So, I'm
> having to send the unit to a recovery place and paying the freight to
> get the files moved onto a new drive. Of course, the bad part of that
> is the warranty will be null and void the moment they crack the case
> open. I've budgeted a few hundred bucks for this, but will gladly do
> so as the recovered files are worth a few times that.
>
> Back in the dark ages when 9GB drives were the fattest cows in the
> barn, the company I worked for spec'd a particular model for inclusion
> in our digital hard-drive systems we were selling. These Micropolis
> drives experienced a 100% failure rate within a year if the drives
> were positioned in the vertical position and a 100% failure within two
> years if in the horizontal position. Spindle failure. Of course, we
> had sold hundreds and hundreds of them....
>
> In a parallel universe, here in the phone industry, we deal with
> mega-millions of dollars in telephone, data and optical equipment.
> What we've learned is that no matter how well engineered and built
> something is, when stuff goes bad, it's pretty universal across all of
> the installed units. It's pretty crazy in that within two weeks I had
> five 120km CWDM SFPs fail or drift out of spec. Not a single one was
> in the same location, same lambda or carrying the same type of
> payload. The only explanable thing is that they all were put into
> service within a couple weeks of each other. What is really creepy is
> when totally passive devices like patch-panels or fiber-optic jumpers
> decide to fail. Every few months we have a "say what?" moment.
> Recently, we installed a major fiber-optic DWDM system where we had
> literally 3/4 of two different types of cards fail. These were
> literally out-of-box or near out-of-box failures. Problem? A fiber
> connector. Bewildering.
>
> Very specific to the hard-drive industry, the use of MTBF is a little
> different than you'd expect. A MTBF of 200,000 hours (typical) means
> that one out of every 200,000 manufactured units will fail every hour.
> Of course, that also means based on freshly shipped units. Past the
> first 1000 hours of operation, the rate of failure will go up.
>
> AG
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