clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote

It works fine.

There is NO quality control.

That is just plain wrong. They obviously dont accept the stuff
thats produced in someone's home if it hasnt been done properly.

You CAN get chinese goods of exceptional quality - and from
the same "manufacturer", on the same day, get an "identical"
product of such abysmal quality you would not believe it
came from the same PLANET, muchless the same supplier.

Sure.

This is why REPUTABLE distributors of chinese electronics
test and repackage ALL of their product before retailing.

Makes a lot more sense to test the product when its manufactured.

Yes, but if you don't own the plant, and you just buy a
"chinese" product and rebrand it you don't have that luxury.

Sure.

North american quality control can sort the GOOD stuff,
which can be sold under a particular brand name, from
the "also-rans" that are sold off to lesser brand companies
to sell at a lower cost and/or to a less discriminating clientelle.

Doesnt happen with ipods most obviously.

No, but they are made in a plant spec'd and built by Apple.
It's just a transplanted American plant with low wage
non-union labour, and is highly automated.

It DOES happen with a very large number of products sold in
Canada and the USA. Perhaps not "down under" where you hang out.

Same thing happens here with the crap end of the market.

Its perfectly possible to have decent quality control with chinese manufacture.

Yes, if YOU own and control the plant.

And even if you dont too.

They dont even do that with mass market hard drives anymore.

Depends what you call "mass market"

Nope, it only has one meaning. What the bulk of the market ends up with.

If a company puts their name and a 2 or 3 year warranty on
a hard drive, they have either calculated or empirically tested
the product so they KNOW what their warranty exposure is.

Or they realise that they have to offer at least as good a
warranty as their competitors do, and factor in the known
field failure rate to the price that gets charged for the drives.

Those that tried that are not in the business any more.

Wrong. Those that went out of the business did so for other reasons,
most obviously with IBM, Fujitsu and most recently Maxtor.

I used to work for the largest hard drive distriibutor (at the time) in Canada. Saw
more manufacturers come and go, driven into bankrupsy by warranty costs.

Yes, that certainly happened with IBM and Maxtor,
but it wasnt due to Harvard MBA type micromanaging.

Just the design footshots that happened with Seagate
and WD which they managed to survive for other reasons.

When micromanaged to death by a "harvard MBA
type" the same thing happened to that company.

Thats not a hard drive manufacturer.

If they are "selling on cost" with a 90 day warranty,
nothing has been either tested or calculated.

Wrong. They obviously know what their return rate has been.

Nope. No history.

There's always a history.

See above.

See above.

They have a pretty good handle on their "prime" drives, but the
"oem" or "consumer" drives had such a wide range of quality/defects
that they didn't (and in many cases today, don't) have a clue.

That is just plain wrong.

(beyond the fact they are making enough that they can break even
if a few more than they guessed fail, and 50% of those get back for
warranty within the alotted time, and are returned according to the
warranty requirement (in original shipping/packageing).

And sometimes they **** that up very spectacularly indeed like
IBM with their 75 and 60 GXPs and they get an obscene failure
rate and end up deciding to get out of the hard drive business.

Fujitsu gave up their 3.5" drives with the utter fiasco the MPGs turned into.

Correct. Went from less than 2 failures in 5 years of selling Fujitsu
drives to 7 out of 8 in one order failing in less than 6 months.

And a full class action suit to boot. IBM too.

Maxtor went bust when they ****ed that up and sold out to Seagate.

And at least a dozen other companies have dissapeared over the last 10 years

Yes, but it wasnt due to micromanaging by MBA types.

- there wasn't enough flesh on their bomes to even
make them worth buying out and picking over.

Yep, the hard drive industry is one hell of a cutthroat industry
and one major design footshot can easily sink the ship.