Comment by deepsquirrelnet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepsquirrelnet | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

deepsquirrelnet

I used to work in manufacturing test for an SSD supplier. This would normally be covered by an “ongoing reliability test” in quality. But I also witnessed that quality can be a highly politicized arm of manufacturing companies, and finding issues with products is not always well received, while approving products is always well received.

In many consumer products, tests like that are often not implemented or curtailed compared to OEM products. When you buy from a company like Dell or Apple, you get the benefit of having a large organization providing accountability. In other words, when a company like Dell represents their interests in receiving quality products to uphold their reputation, they also have a shared interest with the end consumer — but carry a lot more weight since they represent large contracts with the supplier. Suppliers tend to put more effort into testing their OEM products so as not to damage their business relationships.

Anyway, this kind of thing happens all the time in consumer storage. Likely nobody was doing reliability testing on these drives in the first place since that costs money and can only expose problems they didn’t really want to know about.

In a perfect world this would be true, especially at the large business level where the integrator will get their ass sued by the customer or at least be forced to make good on the situation.

In the retail and small/medium business market the reality is that Dell, HP, and the like are under so much pressure to cut margins that they'll go with whoever is cheapest, and customers almost never escalate things to tort.

Dell PC power supplies are made for them by someone else, proprietary in size and connector, and gosh, wouldn't you know it - they have a pretty high failure rate. They last just long enough to make it out of the warranty period, and then they make for a really nice revenue stream for Dell via replacement PSUs or pushing the customer to buy a new system entirely.

Even failure within the warranty period is acceptable in the consumer market because integrators have it down to a science exhausting people on the customer support side. Long phone queue times, incompetent support agents who have to transfer you to different agents and likely drop the call entirely, silly policies like requiring a reformat/OS reinstall for everything, and so on.

>Even failure within the warranty period is acceptable in the consumer market because integrators have it down to a science exhausting people on the customer support side. Long phone queue times, incompetent support agents who have to transfer you to different agents and likely drop the call entirely, silly policies like requiring a reformat/OS reinstall for everything, and so on.

This is one reason why I believe Apple computers last much longer than Windows computers. With Apple, they only sell a few models in high volume. So if there's an issue, everyone will know about it and Apple will often have to do a mass recall or provide free repairs. And since Apple prices are higher, you'd assume that they use better-grade parts on average.

> So if there's an issue, everyone will know about it and Apple will often have to do a mass recall or provide free repairs.

I wouldn't say Apple is any better than anyone else - aging iPhone batteries and butterfly keyboards both had a class action lawsuit settlement, it wasn't out of good PR that these got addressed. I suppose you are right that everyone will know about them, though, given that those were from memory.

>I wouldn't say Apple is any better than anyone else - aging iPhone batteries and butterfly keyboards both had a class action lawsuit settlement, it wasn't out of good PR that these got addressed. I suppose you are right that everyone will know about them, though, given that those were from memory.

That's the point. If 5% of PSUs failed inside a Dell computer just outside of warranty, no one would care except those affected. If the same thing happened on a Mac, you'd get a media storm and a class-action lawsuit and Apple will eventually settle by giving out repairs - even if the failure happened outside of warranty.

I did get a free battery replacement for my iPhone 6S.

i only had apple devices fail in my hands. all with video memory corruption. never had a hardware failure when the company used Lenovo (ibm era)

Buying from an OEM certainly doesn’t come with any guarantees. It’s a price/quality contract in almost all cases though. The OEM defines an acceptable defectivity rate in their contract (even if allowed DPM if high). This effectively establishes a requirement at the supplier to ensure they will meet it.

For consumer products, you can assume that this added requirement doesn’t exist.

Edit: as another example, it’s well known among hardware suppliers that being a supplier to Apple can be a double edged sword for this reason. They have very high quality expectations and they squeeze extremely hard on price. But for that, they bring high volumes. If your company doesn’t have their stuff together, they can easily get raked over the coals in Apple contracts.

> ...Dell, HP, and the like are under so much pressure to cut margins that they'll go with whoever is cheapest, and customers almost never escalate things to tort.

Can confirm. Have an office supplied HP business desktop. One day noticed that my system is slower than normal. After 5 minutes with smartctl, I found out that the SSD was constantly throttling down SATA link (SATA downshift), was not reading or writing more than ~250 MBps, and had some wonky latency issues.

Got a new SSD, moved the drive with dd, and all my problems are solved. Previous drive was by Samsung, but it was a "value" drive which even Google knew nothing about. It was probably built with bottom of the barrel parts, and something went bad earlier than expected.

> Even failure within the warranty period is acceptable in the consumer market because integrators have it down to a science exhausting people on the customer support side.

This has been true for at least decades. It's why I completely ignore all warranties when I'm deciding what to purchase -- they tend to be essentially worthless, once you factor in the cost of trying to make a warranty claim.

It's funny because retail-boxed Intel CPUs used to overclock better, at least in the Celeron 300A days.

Except that a non-overclockable CPU isn't a lower quality one. In fact, they may be sold cheaper to the OEM because they are less likely to be overclockable.

> non-overclockable CPU isn't a lower quality one

Generally, it did mean this. If we are to believe that Intel largely made the same CPU, and "binned" their processors into different speeds based on what they were stable at. And locked their multipliers to speeds that they'll be reliable at (lower quality = lower multiplier). But one could still set the bus speed to whatever they liked, and the retail boxed chips handled this better.

There would also be a market demand factor to it. If they got a large order for 266MHz chips, they'd lock them at the multipler for that, even if they could handle 300 or 333 MHz.

(Part of the rumour for some Celeron chips was that they were the same die but a fraction of the cache, so "Pentium" chips produced with a cache defect could have that section locked out and labelled a Celeron)

Nowadays, CPUs can often throttle themselves, so this binning wasn't as necessary to mitigate batch to batch variation.

> Part of the rumour for some Celeron chips

Not a rumor. Starting with Coppermine, Celerons were Binned P3s. Same die size and all.

Interestingly, AMD did not typically do the same for the Duron (with one or two exceptions). My understanding at the time was their dies had extra cache to handle defects without full binning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com