In news:hka924$8ui$1@reader2.panix.com,
the wharf rat typed on Tue, 2 Feb 2010 22
0:28 +0000 (UTC):
> In article <hk9f0f$rkc$1@news.eternal-september.org>,
> BillW50 <BillW50@aol.kom> wrote:
>>
>> Secondly, these things are mass-produced. And being mass-produced,
>> you only need a small sample.
>>
>
> That's a false statement. Modern manufacturing uses statistical
> quality control methods to reduce testing sample sizes by controlling
> the process, but it doesn't eliminate quality testing. The samples
> are much smaller than you might predict but a sample of 12 out of a
> billion would never work.
Well I never said I could speak for 12 billion flash drives. So get that
idea right out of your head. Secondly, I've done my research and I am
convinced they are reliable. In your mind, they are not. Which is fine
by me. As there are more and more people learning the very same thing.
And they are just becoming more and more popular than ever before.
And before there was any study that I knew about the reliability of hard
drives. I did my own study. I did a study on just 20 hard drives over 20
years and I came up with just under 7% early failure rate. I didn't know
how close I really was until.
Google later did their own study of hard drive reliability of 100,000
over 5 years. And their study showed I was only off by a small margin.
Although if I only counted the drives just the last five years, my
numbers would have been much lower. As my experience is that hard drives
are generally far more reliable in recent years than they were 20 years
ago.
>> For example, when a cook makes a meal to feed an army. He/she tastes
>> a small sample to make sure they made it with all of the right
>> ingredients. Now the cook doesn't eat all of the food to test it,
>> now do they?
>
> A cook performs many samples over time of a single item. Typical
> mass production manufacturing performs a small number of samples over
> time of a large population of items. Each sample size is dictated by
> required tolerances (margins of error) and population size.
>
> (Anyway, cooking's an art not a science. Each dish is a little bit
> different. One of the challenges a chef faces is developing
> consistency.)
I think many would disagree with you there. As that Taiwan electrolytic
capacitor fiasco about 9 years ago is a good example. As *recipes* for
making components are a well kept secret. Although a Taiwan company had
stolen the *recipe* from a Japanese company and started to produce their
own. But get this, the stolen *recipe* lacked one very important
*ingredient*. And all of those Taiwan caps started failing left and
right after about a year. I have one $800 Avatar computer that became
worthless in 11 months because of this. The last time it was turned on,
the video was in B&W and you could only run DOS. Anything running in 32
bit just wouldn't work.
Manufacturing electronic components has their recipes, ingredients,
batches, baking, etc. just like cooking does. As they use many of the
same terminology. Thus I don't see them much different like you do. By
the way, I was involved in component manufacturing when I worked for
Magnavox. So were did you get your experience from again?
>> I have all of these Asus 701/702 netbooks. Now are mine any different
>> than other people's Asus 701/702 netbooks? Nope not really.
>
> That's another mistake. They are very different. Each part is
> identical to the other parts in other laptops within certain
> tolerances.
> The machine is designed to work as long as each part is within those
> tolerances even if it's slightly "different". You get very
> interesting failures when several parts are just barely out of spec.
My Asus notebooks work just like anybody else. You can talk all you want
to but it doesn't change the truth. Of course components has to be
within spec. Otherwise it is a failure. But there are millions of these
things out there still working. Reports of failures are far and few in
between.
>> Your logic is far different than any I ever met, except from bozo
>> the clown.
>
> If you actually remember Bozo you'd also remember that he
> solved more mysteries than Scooby Doo. (The cartoon Bozo, that is.)
Sorry, no I don't remember. Too involved with science and engineering I
guess.
>> For starters, take a 4GB SLC flash drive. To wear one out, you need
>> to write 400TB worth of data to wear out each cell.
>
> No, you only need to have a failure in an important part of the
> array. Because of file system structure a couple of dead cells in
> the first meg or so would probably be fatal.
>
>> Second of all, solid state drives have proved reliable and are used
>> for a main operating system. As many use them all of the time
>
> Many people buy lottery tickets, don't back up their data, and use
> their birthday as their Paypal password. It's not correct because
> everyone does it. That's called the "appeal to common practice", and
> is shown to be bad logic by everyone's mother:
>
> "If Johnny jumped off the roof would YOU jump off the roof too??"
Apples and oranges. I have no problems running Windows or Linux on flash
drives and I do so everyday. You can believe they are not reliable as
much as you wish. It doesn't bother me one bit. And I have found flash
drives many times more reliable than hard drives so far.
>> And in the next
>> year or two, half of all laptops are said will be using the solid
>> state type instead of conventional hard drives.
>>
> Oh, and I suppose they'll all be using Rambus memory and we'll be
> driving to Best Buy in our flying cars?
Nope, I haven't heard that one yet.
>> And no, they are not too expensive. You can buy laptops with 1TB or
>> more with a solid state drive right now. And some of the cheapest
>> netbooks are using solid state drives already. So they are very
>> affordable.
>
> Terabyte SSD drives retail for about $3,800. That's hardly price
> competitive with traditional magenetic storage.
That isn't a lot. The first GUI personal computer was designed back in
'71 with a list price of $10,000. My first laptop back in '84 cost over
$2,000. People who buys powerful game machines and servers, this is
reasonable. I've heard that some servers are now using flash drives
instead of hard drives.
>> You haven't done any research at all.
>
> At least I looked up the price of the things on newegg before
> talking about how affordable they are. $3800 isn't affordable unless
> you're talking about a car.
When you are talking about powerful laptops or desktops, that is a
common price range. And it doesn't sound out of line to me. After all
back in the late 80's I bought $1000 worth of GEOS OS and software
applications. Sounds a bit expensive I know. But it was still cheaper
than a Mac. <grin>
And I know you like to argue and are often full of it. But I know that
the prices will come down very quickly in the next few years at any
rate. I know you said you don't believe it, while history shows you are
wrong in either case.
--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Windows XP SP3