And I want to add something about "planned obsolescence" because it
is often misused. If people are choosing to buy cheap, it's hardly
that the manufacturers are making things so they will break. The
consumer often wants that cheaper tv set or VCR.



Rather than planned obsolescence, it's normally more a case of how many
cost reducing corners can they cut and still have it last "long enough".
It's hard to blame the manufactures, they're supplying what the average
consumer is demanding.



If my computer from 1979 had been intended to last forever, it would
have been way out of range in terms of price. Because they'd have to
anticipate how much things would change, and build in enough so upgrading
would be doable. So you'd spend money on potential, rather than spending
money later on a new computer that would beat out what they could
imagine in 1979. And in recent years, it is the consumer who is deciding
to buy a new computer every few years (whether a deliberate decision or
they simply let the manufacturer lead, must vary from person to person.)



There's been various attempts over the years at marketing easily
upgradeable computers, but invariably by the time you were ready to
upgrade, the cost of a new CPU module was a sizable portion of the cost
of a whole new PC, as well as the rest of the major components were
showing their age.

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:12:21 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

lsmartino wrote
Rod Speed wrote

Please explain how the manufacturer of a light bulb, fluorescent
lamp or CFL can provide an estimate of the lifetime of the lamp.

That is trivial to do by running an adequate sized batch of
incandescent light bulbs under appropriate test conditions etc.

Don´t say "They can´t because it´s impossible".
Explain exactly why it´s impossible.

Its up to those who claim that its possible to design a device
to die one year after the warrant expires how that can be done.

Well, it can be estimated how long will a power semiconductor
run if you leave it without a proper heatsink.

Not in a domestic environment it aint, because
the ambient temperature varys so much.

I got a bit of a start relatively recently when someone was having
overheating problems with their PC to discover that they were one
of the few in this area who were silly enough to have no form of
cooling whatever, not even a swamp cooler, in an area which can
see 10 days over 40C some summers. We had one just last week
and it got to 44C, and it was like walking into a furnace walking
outside my airconditioned house.

Open any Samsung TV, for instance, to see for yourself
how important transistors are left bare, dissipatting heat
to the air. I don´t see why it should be difficult for the
manufacturer to know that these particular transistors
left overheating will fail within a finite number of hours.

There is no finite number of hours, because the
ambient temp varys so much in domestic situations.

Those who dont have any cooling at all in an area which
can see a week over 40C wont survive the warranty
period and those who have decent air conditioning will
find that the TV lasts long past the warranty period.

Also, you will notice that the same circuit will have electrolytic
capacitors near heat sources, when it´s a well known fact that
heat shortens dramatically the life of electrolytics caps.

In practice that isnt a significant problem with domestic appliances.
Essentially because you dont see many electros in that situation with them.

The manufacturer know how to properly design an electronic
circuit in order to provide a long life, but it also it knows how
to design it to fail within a short term under certain conditions,

No they dont on that silly claim about surviving the
warranty fine, but failing immediately after that expires.

and accordingly they estimate a warranty just long
enough to cover the product for a safe term, a
safe term for the manufacturer, not the user.

Have fun explaining how come not a single electronic device
I have ever owned has died just after the warranty has run out.

And that includes my latest gigantic widescreen TV too.

Of course it´s impossible to predict exactly how many years
the TV will last, but the manufacturer count with statistical
data which says, for instance, that a TV set is turned on
10 hours per day for instance, and taking that into account,
and estimating how long the weakest part of the TV will last
under these conditions, they can determine the warranty lapse.

Pity about the TVs that get left on all the time.

The claim is completely fanciful and those making that sort of
claim have obviously never actually designed a damned thing.

And only the stupidest manufacturer would deliberatly design
their product to die as soon as the warranty has expired
anyway, because the bulk of those who had bought such
a dud wouldnt be buying another from that manufacturer.

They also do product reliability testing to see
how long on average it is before a product fails.

No they dont with domestic appliances.

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

Yes they do.

No they dont.

They quote the useful lifetime of a hardrive in MTBF hours.

That is calculated, not measured. Convert that MTBF
to years and you will discover why they cant possibility
have tested them to get those numbers.

Don´t answer "it´s impossible" if you are not prepared to give
a real explanation. Samsung, Seagate, WD... any decent hard
drive manufactures gives an estimate lifetime of their products.
These estimates are provided in the datasheet of each harddrive.

And they are ESTIMATES, not measured results.

Exactly, these are estimates,

Pity the claim was about TESTING, which doesnt happen, like I said.

and most of the time very accurate,

Like hell it is. Have you actually tried converting
the MTBF of a current hard drive to years ?

The average quality EIDE drive has a published MTBF of 400,000 hours.
That wouild be 45 years on my computer. I've had LOTS that never made
3 years. If they test 1000 drives for 400 hours and get one failure,
they have their MTBF of 400,000 hours - 1 failure in 400,000 hours of
running. They will actually do a larger test sample over a larger time
span Likely 2500 for 500 hours. That gives them 125,000,000 running
hours and if they have 3.125 failures they have a 400,000 hour MTBF.-
but that's how the numbers are arrived at if they are not just using
statistical analysis methods.(predictive failure). Today's hard drives
with S.M.A.R.T. technology can predict their failure date quite
accurately. (using third party software).I just pulled 2 drives from
service because they predicted their own death in less than 60 days.
One was made on the 123rd day of 2003 (seagate), the other the last
day of January 2004 (wd).
Being a WD Caviar retail drive it has a 1 year warranty. If it was a
"distribution" drive, it would have a 3 year warranty. Might have
lasted 2 years - but I don't take a chance on my data.
The Seagate has a 1 year warranty, and was in a computer that only
runs a few hours a week - and lasted less than 3 years.
I used to work for the (then) largest hard drive distributor in
Canada.

specially those concerning the maximum number of startups/stops
the drive can tolerate before the heads get completely worn.

Wrong again. Its such a round number it cant have been produced
by TESTING, and the number of starts and stops dont produce
any wear of the heads with modern hard drives anyway.

I don´t want to imply that all manufacturers are dishonest per se, but
I can easily see how a given manufacturer can produce different items,
with differents level of quality of design and manufacture. And these
differences *will* impact the useful lifetime of the final product.

Separate matter entirely to the claim that they do reliability TESTING with domestic appliances.

They dont, and dont with mass market hard drives either to
produce the MTBF or the number of start stop cycles either.



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

But it's the same reason that I continue to accept and use old
appliances that I can repair myself.
For example I refuse to buy a stove that incorporates a digital
timer/clock; they are virtually unrepairable! Eventually can see
myself, however, ending up with one of those and deliberately
disconnecting the digital timer clock or modifying the stove to use one
my older (saved) clock/timers or just dong away with the timer
altogether.


Why are they virtually unrepairable? The timer/clock modules have only a
handful of parts, and most of them are pretty standard. On top of that,
it's very rare in my experience for them to fail. The one microwave I've
fixed that had a problem with the timer board, it was a cracked solder
joint at a relay and was easy to fix. I've never seen a bad custom IC on
one, not saying it can't happen but it's certainly rare.

I have however seen quite a few of the synchronous motors that used to
drive the mechanical clock/timer assemblies fail.

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote
clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote
clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Too_Many_Tools wrote

What explains the electric toothbrushes that don't have
replaceable batteries? You have to toss a $60-$120
device just because a $5 battery has failed.

Using the battery to enforce product obscelence
is standard practice in the industry.

Mindlessly superficial. The reality is that its a lot easier to
allow battery replacement with some items than with others.

I totally disagree.

Your problem.

No reason they can't make a new standard - Lithium Polymer battery
pack about the size of a SD card that just snaps into a device.

Wrong again. There's a real problem with Lithium anything
and separate chargers. Thats why you dont see the standard
AA and AAA cells in Lithium anything format either.

Nobody said anything about separate chargers.

I just did.

ANd you DO see lithium AA and AAA batteries
- they are just not rechargable lithium

Pity we happened to be discussing rechargeable batterys.

(and in fact, there ARE rechargeable Lithiums in the AA format.)

Nope.

That would look after all the ipods and
ipodlikes, as well as all kinds of PDAs etc.

There's a reason cellphones dont all use the same standard battery.

Yes, there is. It's called "marketing" and "catch'em while you can"

Nope. Nokia for example use the same format battery
over multiple generations of their cellphones. Its actually
about a physical format that works well with cellphones.

Nokia has used several different battery standards. The 5100-6100
series uses the same battery, in Nicad, NiMh and Lithium flavours.
Other series of phones use different battery configurations.

Yes, primarily as a result of a change to the size and shape of the
phone that meant that the physical format and size of the battery
used with the 5***-6*** series was no longer suitable.

Much more sensible in this regard than Motorola and all the other manufacturers.

That last is going too far.

Something about a northern european mentality - they actually THINK.

Nope. That came about for other reasons.

And some panasonic cordless phones use standard
AA NiMH or NiCad batterys, so it cant have a damned
thing to do with any northern european mentality.

Some cellphone companys actually allow the end user to
update the firmware in the phone. Nokia generally doesnt.

I've actually got one that not only takes its own format battery,
but allows you to use AA batterys in an emergency, but that has
the real downside that its much thicker than current cellphones
and considerably bigger overall too.

My cordless phone does in fact use standard NiMH or NiCad AA
batterys, and its much thicker than most modern cellphones. Not as
important with a cordless which doesnt get carried around as much.

On the ipod nano it's just the simplicity of assembly that counts

Nope.

Please explain.

Its the tiny physical format that makes user changable batterys less
practical, particularly when you cant charge them outside the ipod easily.

There is no need to charge them outside the ipod if
all you want to do is make the ipod last longer than
the 2 year life of the current non-replaceable battery

Correct. But its quite feasible to replace the battery when it no longer
has an adequate charge retention, you dont have to throw the ipod away.

- it's crimped together, but not sealed, so if it gets wet it's finished,

It would be anyway even if the case was sealed, just like with cellphones.

and it IS possible to take it apart - but the battery is soldered
on, rather than plug-in, because it's simpler/cheaper.

Its obviously still possible to replace the battery.

Not if you can't get them, it isn't.

You'll be able to get them, just because of the volume of those sold.

Could still replace the battery - but they are NOT AVAILABLE.

NOT YET.

And by the time they are, the units will be obsolete.

Who cares if they still work fine ?

And if you get the beggars wet, the battery goes south.

Same with cellphones. There is no evil conspiracy,
its about producing a cost effective product.

I didn't say it was a conspiracy.

The OP did.

I said it was building as cheaply as possible (and often cheaper).

Have fun explaining why the absolute vast bulk of cellphones
can still be opened fine, and have replaceable covers etc.

No problem - they are designed with EXCHANGEABLE
batteries so you can go weeks between charging.

Doesnt explain the fact that you can dismantle the phone fine.

It would have been considerably cheaper to glue the phone
together and still have a removeable back that contains the battery.

Ever try to charge a cellphone battery out in the bush in West Africa?
- where you DO see cell phones miles and miles from any electrical power?

They werent designed for that unusual situation.

The batteries get swapped out in town and recharged there.
You get two with your phone and "bob's your uncle" Just drop
off dead ones and pick up charged ones - pay a small fee.

And you can also replace just the battery and not the entire
phone when the battery no longer holds the charge adequately.

So much for the claim that the manufacturers deliberately force
you to replace the phone when you can just replace the battery.

Also, cell phones are a "vanity item" so there is a large aftermarket
in customized cases for some brands. There are also MANY that
can not be readilly dissassembled beyond removing the battery.

Hardly any dont allow you to replace the battery when that is necessary.

It's the bean-counters running the shop.

Have fun explaining why the absolute vast bulk of cellphones
can still be opened fine, and have replaceable covers etc.

I've worked for a company (computer industry) that was
quite successful until a harvard MBA type started "managing"
the company. It went from profitable to 1.5 million dollars
a year loss in 18 months. Was gone in 22.

Clearly hasnt happened with Apple, Nokia, etc etc etc.

It came VERY close to happening to Aapple.

Not for that reason. Different reason entirely, the same one that sank Commodore.

Just about got Gateway too.

Again, not for that reason.

Might still get HP/Compaq if they don't get their corporate
head out of (A) the sand or (B) their backsides.

Bet it wont.

What happened to half the computer companies
that were in the market as little as 10 years ago?
The majority were micromanaged to death.

Nope, they died for other reasons. In the case of Commodore,
they were never going to survive once the bulk of their market
had moved off to dedicated games consoles.

In the case of DEC, they were never going to survive
once the bulk of the market had moved to PCs.

In the case of IBM, they were never going to survive in the
personal PC market once the vast bulk of the market no
longer needed the security blanket of the IBM logo and
they never had a hope in hell of competing with Taiwan.


Everett M. Greene wrote
Rod Speed writes
terry wrote

Although recent discussion/discovery that IPods will
exhaust their batteries in approximately one to two
years do clearly raise the question? "Designed to fail?".

Doesnt explain stuff like cordless phones that use standard
batterys.

What explains the electric toothbrushes that don't have
replaceable batteries? You have to toss a $60-$120
device just because a $5 battery has failed.

A friend bought a brand new Neptune washer that didn't last a month.
The dealer had to replace it TWICE before he had one that lasted over a
month.




I got one of those for free because the motor controller had failed and
the repair was supposed to cost $400. I got lucky and touching up a few
cracked solder joints fixed it. Another I got I wasn't quite so lucky
with and some of the mosfets had shorted which in turn took out just
about every semi on the board including the big custom chip. They used
underrated triacs on the upper control board as well and I've fixed a
number of those which were burned out by out of spec door lock motors.

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote
clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote
lsmartino wrote
Rod Speed wrote

It would **** the environment much more to have every
low level component easily unpluggable and replaceable.

Please explain why.

It should be obvious. Try counting the cost of all those sockets for
all the ics, let alone what that would do to the size of the device etc.

You couldnt even use surface mount anymore either.

No reason subassemblies can not be replaceable.

No point when there is only one with stuff like
an ipod, electric toothbrush, cellphone etc.

Connectors today can be made extremely compact,

And still cost signifcantly more than no connector at all.

With the failure rate with PCs so low, its a complete waste of money.

and with LSI the active components can all be put
into one plug-in component worth a couple of dollars.

What they actually do is surface mount that on a single component and
allow what is needed for the owner/monkey to press to be connected etc.

SMT could still be used on the "backbone" which
could also be a low cost field replaceable part.

Why would it be low cost when its the bulk of the product
like with an ipod, a cellphone, a cordless phone, etc etc etc.

Because even the way they are built today they are "low cost".

Pity thats true in spades of the device itself.

And I'm talking things like 2000 dollar large screen TVs like the Sony
mentioned thad had the drivers in the non-replaceable cable to the screen.

Thats just bad design.

The circuit in question likely costs Sony less than $3 to install where it is.
Add $10 to make it readilly replaceable, and you increase the cost by 0.5%

Sure, but its just another example of bad design.

There is absolutely NOTHING that cannot be made
serviceable in the consumer electronics arena.

Yes, but what is the point of making it easy to replace the
vast bulk of the device when the failure rate is so low ?

The failure rate is plenty high enough - even if you limit it to "infant mortality"

Nope, the modern reality is that is a hell of a lot cheaper overall to
just toss those in the bin and stamp out another in the asian factory.

Thats been the case for decades now with the cheapest domestic
appliances like toasters and the point at which it makes not sense to
increase the cost of the design so you can replace modules continues
to move up from the cheapest products to the more expensive ones.

Failure within the lifespan of the display panel is likely well over 5%.

Depends entirely on how you define the lifetime, and those are
mostly repairable by module swapping with laptops, notebooks,
TVs etc, tho its often quite a marginal proposition to do that
now with the cheapest laptops and notebooks that may well
need a new battery as well before its discarded etc.

On some brands of laptop computers it's a whole lot higher than that.

Sure, but thats the inevitable consequence of maintaining
stocks of spares and using expensive first world skilled
labor to swap the failed component.

PCs are still very modular indeed with the exception of the
motherboard and they still mostly have the cpu socketed,
even tho hardly anyone ever sees a cpu failure or a need
to upgrade the cpu either.

Yes, it makes sense to have cellphone batterys readily
replaceable, and the front cover etc, because batterys
do have a limited number of recharge cycles and people
do bugger up the covers quite often, but there isnt any
point in having more than a single module with all the
electronics on it with a cellphone or even a PC motherboard.

Will it cost more? Likely Does it have to? Not necessarily.

Corse it has to over no connector at all.

There are ways of doing things that add functionality without adding cost.

Nope, not over just one component.

Which is why you cant generally open plugpacks to repair
them anymore and why its been like that for decades now.

Would people buy it? Smart people would.

I doubt it when they have adequate information on the failure rate.

I suspect some on this list would not.

Its not a list, they are newsgroups.

OK. picky, picky.

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote
clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote
b wrote
Everett M. Greene wrote
Rod Speed writes
terry wrote

Although recent discussion/discovery that IPods will
exhaust their batteries in approximately one to two
years do clearly raise the question? "Designed to fail?".

Doesnt explain stuff like cordless phones that use standard batterys.

What explains the electric toothbrushes that don't have
replaceable batteries? You have to toss a $60-$120
device just because a $5 battery has failed.

...and let's not forget those plasma tvs of ' a certain well known
brand who invented the walkman' with the driver chips on the
cables to the screen - horizontal black line of death and you
toss a 2000? tv!

Just lousy design, no evil conspiracy.

Conspiracy of idiocy

There is no conspiracy, just idiocy.

they should hang the designers of that one!
Crimes against the environment.

It would **** the environment much more to have every
low level component easily unpluggable and replaceable.

Explain that one.

It should be obvious what the cost of having connectors
for all the caps, resistors, ics etc would cost.

How does that affect the environment?

All those sockets etc have an environmental cost.

I'd love to hear the spin you can put on THIS!!!!!!

You wouldnt know what spin was if it bit you on your lard arse!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On 15 Jan 2007 17:37:57 -0800, "lsmartino"
wrote:


Rod Speed ha escrito:


They can do the estimate considering an ambient temperature of 20ºC -
25ºC. Check the datasheet of any semiconductor and learn something
before you write. Any rise in the temperature will shorten the lifespan
of the product. To me, that´s a quite profitable scenario.


Also, you will notice that the same circuit will have electrolytic
capacitors near heat sources, when it´s a well known fact that
heat shortens dramatically the life of electrolytics caps.

In practice that isnt a significant problem with domestic appliances.
Essentially because you dont see many electros in that situation with them.

Are you crazy? Have you ever seen a modern SMPS? Try to tell all us
that a SMPS (Switched Mode Power Supply, in case you don´t know what a
SMPS is) don´t HAVE electrolytics caps, and that those caps doesn´t
have a finite lifespan. Even electrolytics are classified based on
their MBTF at certain temperatures. Again, try to find the datasheet of
some electrolitycs caps, and educate yourself.

And just about anything electronic today is using SMPSs

The manufacturer know how to properly design an electronic
circuit in order to provide a long life, but it also it knows how
to design it to fail within a short term under certain conditions,

No they dont on that silly claim about surviving the
warranty fine, but failing immediately after that expires.

I replace enought ATX computer SMPSs before they hit 3 years - many
within 2, and too many within one. And they are running, in many
cases, on protected power supplies.


No one is telling that the product will explode right after the
warranty expires, but that it can be designed to fail within a short
life span, especially with cheap products.

and accordingly they estimate a warranty just long
enough to cover the product for a safe term, a
safe term for the manufacturer, not the user.

Have fun explaining how come not a single electronic device
I have ever owned has died just after the warranty has run out.

And that includes my latest gigantic widescreen TV too.

Of course it´s impossible to predict exactly how many years
the TV will last, but the manufacturer count with statistical
data which says, for instance, that a TV set is turned on
10 hours per day for instance, and taking that into account,
and estimating how long the weakest part of the TV will last
under these conditions, they can determine the warranty lapse.

Pity about the TVs that get left on all the time.


A TV, or a computer monitor left on all the time will last less time of
course. A CRT has a definite lifespan, and if the monitor or the TV set
is a LCD based one, the CFL bulbs used to light up the screen have a
definite lifespan. Did you knew that, Mr. Know Nothing ?

And certain parts ONLY fail on start-up because of power surges. Some
devices would run litterally forever if never shut off - others are
robust enough to handle starting and stopping but have finite life
devices. My experience with computer monitors (over 17 years) has been
those left on 24/7 generally outlast those that are started and
stopped several times a day. Phosphor burn used to be the major
problem with 24/7 operation. Today it is SMPS failure. I can't
remember the last monitor I had to replace due to CRT failure. My own
newest monitor is well over 5 years old now. It is generally never
turned off (just powers itself down when I leave)

The claim is completely fanciful and those making that sort of
claim have obviously never actually designed a damned thing.

And only the stupidest manufacturer would deliberatly design
their product to die as soon as the warranty has expired
anyway, because the bulk of those who had bought such
a dud wouldnt be buying another from that manufacturer.

How many people who owned Chevy Vegas bought a second one? THOUSANDS.
And how many who bought Vega bought another Chevy? Thousands and
thousands and tens of thousands. And the average Vega did NOT make it
through warranty. How many people who had their Cadillacs in the shop
more than in their driveway bought another Cadillac? Thousands. And a
few, after the second or third, got smart and bought a Lexus. It took
a friend 7 or 8 Caddies over 3 years to finally make the change. He
figured it had to just be his luck untill he talked to enough other
owners to be convinced it was the CAR, not him.


Tell that to the manufacturer of Coby products, for instance. They have
quite a long time selling trash that fails quite quickly.


They quote the useful lifetime of a hardrive in MTBF hours.

That is calculated, not measured. Convert that MTBF
to years and you will discover why they cant possibility
have tested them to get those numbers.

Don´t answer "it´s impossible" if you are not prepared to give
a real explanation. Samsung, Seagate, WD... any decent hard
drive manufactures gives an estimate lifetime of their products.
These estimates are provided in the datasheet of each harddrive.

And they are ESTIMATES, not measured results.

Educated guesses. Finite Element Analysis. Pretty accurate predictive
methodology.
Exactly, these are estimates,

Pity the claim was about TESTING, which doesnt happen, like I said.

and most of the time very accurate,

Like hell it is. Have you actually tried converting
the MTBF of a current hard drive to years ?


It can be something like 15 years or more of constant use, without a
stop. And I have seen hard drives surviving at least more than 10 years
of hard work.

specially those concerning the maximum number of startups/stops
the drive can tolerate before the heads get completely worn.

Wrong again. Its such a round number it cant have been produced
by TESTING, and the number of starts and stops dont produce
any wear of the heads with modern hard drives anyway.


You are wrong again. When the platters stops, the heads contact the
platters. While the platters are spinning at full speed, the heads are
separated from them by a small air cushion formed by the rotational
speed of the platter. As soon the HDD is turned off, the platters loses
speed, and eventually the air cushion dissapear, thus the heads make
contact with the platters. The same happens in reverse sequence when
the HDD starts. That´s why start / stop cicles have a definite impact
in any HDD. Have you ever wondered why a HDD last less in a home
environment than in a office environment?

Check this out http://phorums.com.au/archive/index.php/t-42666.html It
might teach you a thing or two.
ANd Hard drives that are never shut off generally DO last
significantly longer than those that get powered down (which is why I
disable power management on my servers). I have a set of 10 year old
scsi drives in one of the servers that will likely go another 10 years
if I don't scrap the server. That server has not had a SINGLE FAILURE
over those 10 years. It cost about $10,000 new. The drives were likely
over $1000 each. They are 8gb?
The EIDE drive I just installed is 160gb and cost $79.00. Will it last
10 years? Not likely!

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

clare ha escrito:


I replace enought ATX computer SMPSs before they hit 3 years - many
within 2, and too many within one. And they are running, in many
cases, on protected power supplies.

Me too, and the problem doesn´t stops with the SMPS. I have seen
enough motherboard failures caused by defective capacitors. In fact,
there is even a website www.badcaps.net dedicated to motherboard
failures caused by bad capacitors.


A TV, or a computer monitor left on all the time will last less time of
course. A CRT has a definite lifespan, and if the monitor or the TV set
is a LCD based one, the CFL bulbs used to light up the screen have a
definite lifespan. Did you knew that, Mr. Know Nothing ?

And certain parts ONLY fail on start-up because of power surges. Some
devices would run litterally forever if never shut off - others are
robust enough to handle starting and stopping but have finite life
devices. My experience with computer monitors (over 17 years) has been
those left on 24/7 generally outlast those that are started and
stopped several times a day. Phosphor burn used to be the major
problem with 24/7 operation. Today it is SMPS failure. I can't
remember the last monitor I had to replace due to CRT failure. My own
newest monitor is well over 5 years old now. It is generally never
turned off (just powers itself down when I leave)


That´s interesting. In my experience I have found that computer CRT
monitors left 24/7 on, tend to present an overall decrease in
brightness and focus in less than 4 years, and in some cases they get
pretty unusable. The cheaper the monitor is, the worse is the effect.
Of course, turning it off/on constantly isn´t a good idea either.
Normally I set them to turn off automatically if the computer is left
unused for 1 hour.

Educated guesses. Finite Element Analysis. Pretty accurate predictive
methodology.

ANd Hard drives that are never shut off generally DO last
significantly longer than those that get powered down (which is why I
disable power management on my servers). I have a set of 10 year old
scsi drives in one of the servers that will likely go another 10 years
if I don't scrap the server. That server has not had a SINGLE FAILURE
over those 10 years. It cost about $10,000 new. The drives were likely
over $1000 each. They are 8gb?
The EIDE drive I just installed is 160gb and cost $79.00. Will it last
10 years? Not likely!


I agree with that. I too disable power management in my harddrives and
I haven´t had a single failure with them, and also I have found that
HDDs that are normally 24/7 ON lasts a lot longer, and when they fail,
is normally because a bearing failure, for instance. In the other hand,
I usually replace the HDD´s of my computer as soon as they get 5 years
old. There is no need to take unnecessary risks, specially when the
capacity of HDDs increases each year.

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:49:49 +1100, "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.

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.
Its perfectly possible to have decent quality control with chinese manufacture.
Yes, if YOU own and control the plant.

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

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. 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.

(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.

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



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On Mon, 15 Jan 2007 19:46:11 -0500, John Husvar
wrote:

In article .com,
"Too_Many_Tools" wrote:

A whole big bunch of text and data files will
_still_ fit on a floppy. It's just that floppy drives are being replaced
by inexpensive CD and DVD RW storage that store more and have better
data retention, more or less.


Better data retention? Think again.

Hard drive/tape/floppy (as in magnetic) storage have the best lifespan.
Not necessarily true. Drop that high density floppy on a concrete
floor. Set it on top of your monitor and turn it on. How about hanging
your disc storage on the wall where a high-power mains cable runs up
the wall within 3 feet? Your data can be unreadable in from 1 second
to 2 years.

DC/DVD storage life can be measured in just a few years.
I have a few of the first CD data disks ever sold in Canada back in
about 1985? That are still perfectly readable, and they have not been
stored in "archival" conditions.

Ach, so? I'll have to look farther into this. I'd heard some mumblings
about CD and DVD not being as lasting a storage method as they were
first thought to be.
And if tape is not refreshed it's good for something less than 10
years in proper storage.
Properly stored,pressed CD/DVD life is almost infinite. Die Sub based
rewritables have a more limited lifespan, but still better than 10
years if properly stored and reasonable quality media.


Archival storage of data is a BIG deal that the industry doesn't like
to talk about.

Well, I suppose one could print and store all all the data records on
acid-free paper and then physically go find the ones they wanted.
Shouldn't take more than a medium-sized army of clerks and only a small
hollowed mountain range for the storage.

We could then test the adage about it requiring (some large number)
clerks working (some large number) years to make an error a computer can
make in nanoseconds too.


--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

lsmartino wrote
Rod Speed wrote
lsmartino wrote

Check the datasheet of any semiconductor
and learn something before you write.

I was doing that likely before you were even born thanks.

Any rise in the temperature will shorten the lifespan of the product.

Wrong when the life is indefinite at any temps that the product will ever see.

To me, that´s a quite profitable scenario.

Thanks for that completely superfluous proof that you have never ever designed a TV.

Would you care to show us how many TV´s have you designed?

I wasnt the one making that stupid claim.

Answers like: "many more than you can buy in your entire lifetime",
"a lot before you where born" aren´t valid ones.

You get no say what so ever on what is or is not a valid answer.

Give us real models and brands if you want to have a little credibility.

You've completely blown whatever shred of credibility you might once
have had with your juvenile lines like the one still at the top of the quoting.

Probably you will not ba able to produce a valid answer

Just did thanks.

Also, you will notice that the same circuit will have electrolytic
capacitors near heat sources, when it´s a well known fact that
heat shortens dramatically the life of electrolytics caps.

In practice that isnt a significant problem with domestic
appliances. Essentially because you dont see many
electros in that situation with them.

Are you crazy?

Nope.

Have you ever seen a modern SMPS?

Yep, I may well have been using them since
before you were even born too thanks.

Try to tell all us that a SMPS (Switched Mode Power Supply, in case
you don´t know what a SMPS is) don´t HAVE electrolytics caps,

I never ever said anything even remotely resembling anything like that.

and that those caps doesn´t have a finite lifespan.

Or that either.

Even electrolytics are classified based
on their MBTF at certain temperatures.

Duh.

Again, try to find the datasheet of some electrolitycs caps,

Dont need to, did that likely before you were even born too thanks.

and educate yourself.

So no comments about how the finite lifespan of a capacitor
used in a SMPS will affect the overall lifespan of the product?

That wasnt the silly claim of yours I was commenting on there.

Concentrate on your use of the word HEAT. Pity its not relevant
to most SMPSs in the domestic appliances being discussed.

The manufacturer know how to properly design an electronic
circuit in order to provide a long life, but it also it knows how
to design it to fail within a short term under certain conditions,

No they dont on that silly claim about surviving the
warranty fine, but failing immediately after that expires.

No one is telling that the product will explode right after the warranty expires,

Some have run the mindlessly silly line that it can
be designed to fail just after the warranty runs out.

but that it can be designed to fail within a
short life span, especially with cheap products.

Have fun explaining the host of domestic electronic devices that dont.

I say "it can be designed to have a short life span",

Pity it isnt practical to do that and not incur dramatically increased warranty costs.

not that "all electronic devices are made to fail".

I´m starting to think that you have trouble to understand written language.

We have all noticed that you couldnt bull**** your way out of a wet paper bag.

You were called a blowhard by someone else for a reason.

A TV, or a computer monitor left on all the time will last less time
of course. A CRT has a definite lifespan, and if the monitor or the
TV set is a LCD based one, the CFL bulbs used to light up the screen
have a definite lifespan. Did you knew that, Mr. Know Nothing ?

Corse I did, Master Pathetic Excuse for a Bull**** Artist.

Pity its got nothing to do with your stupid pig ignorant claim
that is possible to design a product to survive the warranty
period and die shortly after that expires, with so much
variation in the detail of how domestic appliances are used.

Since you don´t have a real argument, you proceed to personal disqualification.

Corse you never ever do anything like that yourself, eh ?

And when you try using big words, you might try checking what they
actually mean first too, you can look very silly indeed when you dont.

That´s says a lot about you.

Your juvenile stuff in spades.

Try to tell us that leaving a device turned on
always will not reduce it´s lifespan considerably.

Doesnt happen with PCs. Funny that.

In fact, following your ideas that no real lifespan
can be determinated for a given device,

I never ever said anything even remotely resembling anything like that either.

then the amount of use of that devices shouldn´t have any impact.

Completely off with the fairys now.

The claim is completely fanciful and those making that sort of
claim have obviously never actually designed a damned thing.

And only the stupidest manufacturer would deliberatly design
their product to die as soon as the warranty has expired
anyway, because the bulk of those who had bought such
a dud wouldnt be buying another from that manufacturer.

Tell that to the manufacturer of Coby products, for instance.

Dont need to.

They have quite a long time selling trash that fails quite quickly.

Because there are enough who havent been dudded
with a product of theirs to buy a dud of theirs.

Basic mathematics.

And they are the masters about producing disposable electronics.

Nope.

They are the vivid proof that a device can, and
sometimes is, designed to fail within a short time.

You havent established that thats done deliberately and isnt just lousy design.

They quote the useful lifetime of a hardrive in MTBF hours.

That is calculated, not measured. Convert that MTBF
to years and you will discover why they cant possibility
have tested them to get those numbers.

Don´t answer "it´s impossible" if you are not prepared to give
a real explanation. Samsung, Seagate, WD... any decent hard
drive manufactures gives an estimate lifetime of their products.
These estimates are provided in the datasheet of each harddrive.

And they are ESTIMATES, not measured results.

Exactly, these are estimates,

Pity the claim was about TESTING, which doesnt happen, like I said.

and most of the time very accurate,

Like hell it is. Have you actually tried converting
the MTBF of a current hard drive to years ?

It can be something like 15 years or more of constant use, without a stop.

Its actually a hell of a lot more years than that.

And I have seen hard drives surviving at least more than 10 years of hard work.

Me too. Pity about the years the MTBF turns into.

Check this link
http://www.samsung.com/Products/Hard...tePaper_05.htm

No thanks. I know how MTBF is calculated thanks.

And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF is MUCH better on that.

It shows how MTBF is calculated.

Pity that blows a massive hole in your claims about how MTBF is determined.
Which you carefully deleted from the quoting and I have restored.

specially those concerning the maximum number of startups/stops
the drive can tolerate before the heads get completely worn.

Wrong again. Its such a round number it cant have been produced
by TESTING, and the number of starts and stops dont produce
any wear of the heads with modern hard drives anyway.

You are wrong again.

Nope.

When the platters stops, the heads contact the platters.

Not anymore, they are retracted now.

While the platters are spinning at full speed, the heads are separated from
them by a small air cushion formed by the rotational speed of the platter.

Duh.

As soon the HDD is turned off, the platters loses speed, and eventually
the air cushion dissapear, thus the heads make contact with the platters.

No they dont, they are retracted now.

The same happens in reverse sequence when the HDD starts.

Wrong again.

Check this other one:

http://www.samsung.com/Products/Hard... ecifications

Doesnt say a word about your pig ignorant claim that the heads land on the platter surface.

specially the part about START / STOP cycles,

Thats no news to me, its the same with most current desktop
drives and is substantially higher with most laptop drives.

and the design life of this particular HDD,

Irrelevant to what was being discussed. And that is NOT the time at which
it stops working, or anything even remotely resembling anything like it either.

which by the way, is in current production.

Duh.

Now explain why the manufacturer provides a definite number of START /
STOPS cycles, if those cycles doesn´t cause any kind of damage to the drive

I never ever said it didnt. I JUST said that it ISNT DUE TO THE HEADS
LANDING ON THE PLATTERS, AND CERTAINLY ISNT A RESULT OF
SAMSUNG MEASURING HOW OFTEN YOU CAN START AND STOP
THE DRIVE WHEN ITS THE SAME NUMBER WITH VIRTUALLY ALL
HARD DRIVE MANUFACTURER'S DESKTOP HARD DRIVES.

That´s why start / stop cicles have a definite impact in any HDD.

Wrong again. Its actually the spinup thats the problem life wise.

Really?

Yep.

Please explain that in a credible way.

You're obviously too thick to be able to comprehend any explanation.

You cant even manage to comprehend that what was being
discussed was whether the manufacturers of domestic
appliances bother with life TESTING, or whether hard drive
manufacturers do either with mass market commodity drives.

Also, explain how the heads retract in such a way that
they never touches the platters as the HDD stops..

The heads arms are moved onto a ramp which physically retracts
the heads from the platter surface that they are flying over.

Answers like "I designed HDD´s before they were marketed" or
"I know that because I´m the master engineer of blah, blah, blah"
aren´t valid ones.

You get no say what so ever on what is or is not a valid answer.

Demonstrate what you say.

How odd that you have never ever done anything like that yourself.

Have you ever wondered why a HDD last less in
a home environment than in a office environment?

They dont necessarily.

Check this out http://phorums.com.au/archive/index.php/t-42666.html

No thanks, its just plain wrong on that line about heads landing on the platters now.

If you checked that link, you would have found that it talks about YOU, not HDD´s.

Not interested in what silly little children get up to when they
have been done like a dinner, time after time after time.

Or the sort of juvenile ad hominem that is all you can manage yourself either.

It might teach you a thing or two.

Not even possible for you. You're clearly
certain you know it all when you clearly dont.

Isnt it time you ran up the white flag ?

Nope, because I´m not in a war.

You just did with that link just above. Pathetic, really.

You are the one who wants to feel like an old WW2 hero.

Just another of your pathetic little pig ignorant fantasys.

lsmartino wrote:
clare ha escrito:


I replace enought ATX computer SMPSs before they hit 3 years - many
within 2, and too many within one. And they are running, in many
cases, on protected power supplies.


Me too, and the problem doesn´t stops with the SMPS. I have seen
enough motherboard failures caused by defective capacitors. In fact,
there is even a website www.badcaps.net dedicated to motherboard
failures caused by bad capacitors.



That was not planned, an electrolyte manufacture stole an incomplete
formula and sold loads of defective electrolyte to capacitor makers.

On 15 Jan 2007 19:53:30 -0800, "lsmartino"
wrote:


clare ha escrito:

No, there are different "lithium" chemistries, and the Energizer E2
Lithium is a native 1.7 or 1.8 volt cell. AA cells are roughly 3 ah
each, and loose less than 1% per year to self discharge.

Here's a bit of info on 1.5 volt nominal lithium chemistry. From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_battery

Li-CuO Copper oxide 1.5 V 2.4 V
Can operate up to 150 °C. Developed as a replacement of zinc-carbon
and alkaline batteries. "Voltage up" problem, high difference between
open-circuit and nominal voltage. Produced until mid-1990s, replaced
by lithium-iron sulfide. Current use limited.
Li-Cu4O(PO4)2 Copper oxyphosphate
See Li-CuO
Li-CuS Copper sulfide 1.5 V
Li-PbCuS Lead sulfide and copper sulfide 1.5 V 2.2 V
Li-FeS Iron sulfide Propylene carbonate, dioxolane, dimethoxyethane
1.5-1.2 V
"Lithium-iron", "Li/Fe". used as a replacement for alkaline batteries.
See lithium - iron disulfide.
Li-FeS2 Iron disulfide Propylene carbonate, dioxolane, dimethoxyethane
1.6-1.4 V 1.8 V
"Lithium-iron", "Li/Fe". Used in eg. Energizer lithium cells as a
replacement for alkaline zinc-manganese chemistry. Called
"voltage-compatible" lithiums. 2.5 times higher lifetime for high
current discharge regime than alkaline batteries, no advantage for
low-current applications. Low self-discharge, 10 years storage time.
FeS2 is cheap. Some types rechargeable. Cathode often designed as a
paste of iron sulfide powder mixed with powdered graphite. Variant is
Li-CuFeS2.
Li-Bi2Pb2O5 Lead bismuthate 1.5 V 1.8 V
Replacement of silver-oxide batteries, with higher energy density,
lower tendency to leak, and better performance at higher temperatures.
Li-Bi2O3 Bismuth trioxide 1.5 V 2.04 V

The E2 is Lithium Iron DiSulphide.

They have a self protection circuit built in - a self resetting
poly-fuse type apparatus callet a PTC (Positive Temperature
Co-efficient) This also makes it almost impossible to detonate the
battery by attempting to recharge it. The battery is limitted to 2
amps continuous, but can handle short duration higher peaks
significantly higher.
They CAN BE SHIPPED BY NORMAL METHODS INCLUDING MAIL.

A lithium cell WILL produce 3V regardless of it´s type. A rechargeable
lithium battery or a non rechargeable one will have the same voltage
output. That´s what the chemistry produces, and you can´t reduce that
voltage chemically, so they must have some built in electronic method
to reduce the voltage to the standard 1.5 V a AA cell should produce.

You need to learn to do your research before you make statements you
cannot support. You've proven yourself to be a blowhard.

I was mistaken and I admit it, but that doesn´t make me a "blowhard".
Show me in which part of my posts I presented myself as an specialist
in anything. Your post was accurate, but this part was completely
unnecessary.
Wasn't responding to you with that comment (at least knowingly).

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
lsmartino wrote
Rod Speed wrote

They can do the estimate considering an ambient temperature of 20ºC -
25ºC. Check the datasheet of any semiconductor and learn something
before you write. Any rise in the temperature will shorten the
lifespan of the product. To me, that´s a quite profitable scenario.

Also, you will notice that the same circuit will have electrolytic
capacitors near heat sources, when it´s a well known fact that
heat shortens dramatically the life of electrolytics caps.

In practice that isnt a significant problem with domestic
appliances. Essentially because you dont see many
electros in that situation with them.

Are you crazy? Have you ever seen a modern SMPS? Try to tell all us
that a SMPS (Switched Mode Power Supply, in case you don´t know what
a SMPS is) don´t HAVE electrolytics caps, and that those caps doesn´t
have a finite lifespan. Even electrolytics are classified based on
their MBTF at certain temperatures. Again, try to find the datasheet
of some electrolitycs caps, and educate yourself.

And just about anything electronic today is using SMPSs

The manufacturer know how to properly design an electronic
circuit in order to provide a long life, but it also it knows how
to design it to fail within a short term under certain conditions,

No they dont on that silly claim about surviving the
warranty fine, but failing immediately after that expires.

I replace enought ATX computer SMPSs before they hit 3
years - many within 2, and too many within one. And they
are running, in many cases, on protected power supplies.

Irrelevant to the silly claim they are DESIGNED to fail just outside
the warranty so you will buy another from same manufacture.

No one is telling that the product will explode right after
the warranty expires, but that it can be designed to fail
within a short life span, especially with cheap products.

and accordingly they estimate a warranty just long
enough to cover the product for a safe term, a
safe term for the manufacturer, not the user.

Have fun explaining how come not a single electronic device
I have ever owned has died just after the warranty has run out.

And that includes my latest gigantic widescreen TV too.

Of course it´s impossible to predict exactly how many years
the TV will last, but the manufacturer count with statistical
data which says, for instance, that a TV set is turned on
10 hours per day for instance, and taking that into account,
and estimating how long the weakest part of the TV will last
under these conditions, they can determine the warranty lapse.

Pity about the TVs that get left on all the time.

A TV, or a computer monitor left on all the time will last less time
of course. A CRT has a definite lifespan, and if the monitor or the
TV set is a LCD based one, the CFL bulbs used to light up the screen
have a definite lifespan. Did you knew that, Mr. Know Nothing ?

And certain parts ONLY fail on start-up because of power surges.
Some devices would run litterally forever if never shut off - others
are robust enough to handle starting and stopping but have finite life
devices. My experience with computer monitors (over 17 years) has
been those left on 24/7 generally outlast those that are started and
stopped several times a day. Phosphor burn used to be the major
problem with 24/7 operation. Today it is SMPS failure. I can't
remember the last monitor I had to replace due to CRT failure.

Quite a few are uneconomic to repair due to an FBT failure, but again,
thats just bad design, not deliberately designing them to fail just outside
warranty so you will buy another from the same manufacturer.

My own newest monitor is well over 5 years old now. It is
generally never turned off (just powers itself down when I leave)

Yeah, I used to leave them on all the time and now turn them
off overnight, just because I now have a number of big 19"
monitors and the power consumption isnt trivial.

I dont turn the PCs off tho with the exception of the laptop.

The claim is completely fanciful and those making that sort of
claim have obviously never actually designed a damned thing.

And only the stupidest manufacturer would deliberatly design
their product to die as soon as the warranty has expired
anyway, because the bulk of those who had bought such
a dud wouldnt be buying another from that manufacturer.

How many people who owned Chevy Vegas
bought a second one? THOUSANDS.

Bugger all that had one blow up their face.

And how many who bought Vega bought another Chevy?
Thousands and thousands and tens of thousands.

Bugger all that had one blow up their face.

And the average Vega did NOT make it through warranty.

Irrelevant with cars where most expect to need to make warranty
claims before the Japs put a bomb under the US manufacturers.

How many people who had their Cadillacs in the shop
more than in their driveway bought another Cadillac? Thousands.

Sure, there are a few niche markets with buyers that stupid.

Jaguar in spades. Aston Martins, etc etc etc.

And a few, after the second or third, got smart and bought a Lexus.

Yep, clearly most buyers noticed how the Japs had
put a bomb under the US manufacturers and got a clue.

Happened to Rolls Royce too.

It took a friend 7 or 8 Caddies over 3 years to finally make the
change. He figured it had to just be his luck untill he talked to
enough other owners to be convinced it was the CAR, not him.

Sure, there will always be some that stupid.

Doesnt happen much with domestic appliances tho.

Plenty have decided that Sony products are now steaming turds to be avoided.

Tell that to the manufacturer of Coby products, for instance.
They have quite a long time selling trash that fails quite quickly.

They quote the useful lifetime of a hardrive in MTBF hours.

That is calculated, not measured. Convert that MTBF
to years and you will discover why they cant possibility
have tested them to get those numbers.

Don´t answer "it´s impossible" if you are not prepared to give
a real explanation. Samsung, Seagate, WD... any decent hard
drive manufactures gives an estimate lifetime of their products.
These estimates are provided in the datasheet of each harddrive.

And they are ESTIMATES, not measured results.

Educated guesses. Finite Element Analysis.
Pretty accurate predictive methodology.

And NOT the claimed TESTING.

Exactly, these are estimates,

Pity the claim was about TESTING, which doesnt happen, like I said.

and most of the time very accurate,

Like hell it is. Have you actually tried converting
the MTBF of a current hard drive to years ?

It can be something like 15 years or more of constant
use, without a stop. And I have seen hard drives
surviving at least more than 10 years of hard work.

specially those concerning the maximum number of startups/stops
the drive can tolerate before the heads get completely worn.

Wrong again. Its such a round number it cant have been produced
by TESTING, and the number of starts and stops dont produce
any wear of the heads with modern hard drives anyway.

You are wrong again. When the platters stops, the heads contact the
platters. While the platters are spinning at full speed, the heads
are separated from them by a small air cushion formed by the
rotational speed of the platter. As soon the HDD is turned off, the
platters loses speed, and eventually the air cushion dissapear, thus
the heads make contact with the platters. The same happens in
reverse sequence when the HDD starts. That´s why start / stop cicles
have a definite impact in any HDD. Have you ever wondered why a HDD
last less in a home environment than in a office environment?

ANd Hard drives that are never shut off generally DO last
significantly longer than those that get powered down

They do indeed.

(which is why I disable power management on my servers).

I do on all systems except laptops where it does help time on battery.

And even MS has noticed and thats the default now with XP with desktops.

I have a set of 10 year old scsi drives in one of the servers that will likely
go another 10 years if I don't scrap the server. That server has not had
a SINGLE FAILURE over those 10 years. It cost about $10,000 new.
The drives were likely over $1000 each. They are 8gb?
The EIDE drive I just installed is 160gb and cost $79.00. Will it last
10 years? Not likely!

Bet it will or more strictly last till it gets discarded because its too small or too slow.

I've only ever had one PC hard drive failure, and thats with a hell of a lot of drives.

Not a shred of evidence that anyone is actually stupid enough
to deliberately attempt to design a drive which fails just outside
warranty to be replaced by another from the same manufacturer.

The spectacular duds the PC industry has seen, the IBM 75GXPs,
the 60GXPs, the Fujitsu MPGs etc have all been massive footshots
that were unintended, like most footshots are.

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:12:41 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:


Nokia has used several different battery standards. The 5100-6100
series uses the same battery, in Nicad, NiMh and Lithium flavours.
Other series of phones use different battery configurations.

Yes, primarily as a result of a change to the size and shape of the
phone that meant that the physical format and size of the battery
used with the 5***-6*** series was no longer suitable.

Much more sensible in this regard than Motorola and all the other manufacturers.

That last is going too far.

Something about a northern european mentality - they actually THINK.

Nope. That came about for other reasons.

And some panasonic cordless phones use standard
AA NiMH or NiCad batterys, so it cant have a damned
thing to do with any northern european mentality.

Not talking cordless here. Talking cellular.

Some cellphone companys actually allow the end user to
update the firmware in the phone. Nokia generally doesnt.
They do on their newer GSM phones.

I've actually got one that not only takes its own format battery,
but allows you to use AA batterys in an emergency, but that has
the real downside that its much thicker than current cellphones
and considerably bigger overall too.

My cordless phone does in fact use standard NiMH or NiCad AA
batterys, and its much thicker than most modern cellphones. Not as
important with a cordless which doesnt get carried around as much.

On the ipod nano it's just the simplicity of assembly that counts

Nope.

Please explain.

Its the tiny physical format that makes user changable batterys less
practical, particularly when you cant charge them outside the ipod easily.

There is no need to charge them outside the ipod if
all you want to do is make the ipod last longer than
the 2 year life of the current non-replaceable battery

Correct. But its quite feasible to replace the battery when it no longer
has an adequate charge retention, you dont have to throw the ipod away.

Cna't change tha battery on a Nano because you can't buy one. Not even
from Apple.
- it's crimped together, but not sealed, so if it gets wet it's finished,

It would be anyway even if the case was sealed, just like with cellphones.

and it IS possible to take it apart - but the battery is soldered
on, rather than plug-in, because it's simpler/cheaper.

Its obviously still possible to replace the battery.

Not if you can't get them, it isn't.

You'll be able to get them, just because of the volume of those sold.

Could still replace the battery - but they are NOT AVAILABLE.

NOT YET.

And by the time they are, the units will be obsolete.

Who cares if they still work fine ?

And if you get the beggars wet, the battery goes south.

Same with cellphones. There is no evil conspiracy,
its about producing a cost effective product.

I didn't say it was a conspiracy.

The OP did.

I said it was building as cheaply as possible (and often cheaper).

Have fun explaining why the absolute vast bulk of cellphones
can still be opened fine, and have replaceable covers etc.

No problem - they are designed with EXCHANGEABLE
batteries so you can go weeks between charging.

Doesnt explain the fact that you can dismantle the phone fine.

It would have been considerably cheaper to glue the phone
together and still have a removeable back that contains the battery.

see "vanity"

Ever try to charge a cellphone battery out in the bush in West Africa?
- where you DO see cell phones miles and miles from any electrical power?

They werent designed for that unusual situation.
They sure were. Cell phones were designed to be used where it was
inpractical to run wires. Power or phone.

The batteries get swapped out in town and recharged there.
You get two with your phone and "bob's your uncle" Just drop
off dead ones and pick up charged ones - pay a small fee.

And you can also replace just the battery and not the entire
phone when the battery no longer holds the charge adequately.
That's a given. Cell phones are perhaps the best example, in some
ways, of how devices should be made. Particularly products from Nokia
and a few others. Motorola should have stuck to their power
semiconductor and sensor products, where they were the world standard
instead of concentrating on a field where they have proven to be
rather lackluster, quality wise.

So much for the claim that the manufacturers deliberately force
you to replace the phone when you can just replace the battery.
I've never said that about Phones - even tough the prices the
companies charge for cell phone batteries is nothing short of
criminal.

Also, cell phones are a "vanity item" so there is a large aftermarket
in customized cases for some brands. There are also MANY that
can not be readilly dissassembled beyond removing the battery.

Hardly any dont allow you to replace the battery when that is necessary.

Not talking about the battery - talking about faces/cases/etc.

It's the bean-counters running the shop.

Have fun explaining why the absolute vast bulk of cellphones
can still be opened fine, and have replaceable covers etc.

I've worked for a company (computer industry) that was
quite successful until a harvard MBA type started "managing"
the company. It went from profitable to 1.5 million dollars
a year loss in 18 months. Was gone in 22.

Clearly hasnt happened with Apple, Nokia, etc etc etc.

It came VERY close to happening to Aapple.

Not for that reason. Different reason entirely, the same one that sank Commodore.

Just about got Gateway too.

Again, not for that reason.

Might still get HP/Compaq if they don't get their corporate
head out of (A) the sand or (B) their backsides.

Bet it wont.
We'll see. I give them mabee 5 years if they don't make some BIG
changes.

What happened to half the computer companies
that were in the market as little as 10 years ago?
The majority were micromanaged to death.

Nope, they died for other reasons. In the case of Commodore,
they were never going to survive once the bulk of their market
had moved off to dedicated games consoles.
Commodore built business and home computers too, not just game
computers. Commodore was a business machine company to start with.
Same goes for Sperry Rand/Unisys.
Atari, I'll agree with you - but they had a computer that was superior
to the IBM PC of it's time (as did Sanyo)

In the case of DEC, they were never going to survive
once the bulk of the market had moved to PCs.


In the case of IBM, they were never going to survive in the
personal PC market once the vast bulk of the market no
longer needed the security blanket of the IBM logo and
they never had a hope in hell of competing with Taiwan.

No reason they couldn't do like the rest and set up in taiwan. They
OWNED the PC market.


Everett M. Greene wrote
Rod Speed writes
terry wrote

Although recent discussion/discovery that IPods will
exhaust their batteries in approximately one to two
years do clearly raise the question? "Designed to fail?".

Doesnt explain stuff like cordless phones that use standard
batterys.

What explains the electric toothbrushes that don't have
replaceable batteries? You have to toss a $60-$120
device just because a $5 battery has failed.



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

lsmartino wrote
clare wrote

I replace enought ATX computer SMPSs before they hit 3
years - many within 2, and too many within one. And they
are running, in many cases, on protected power supplies.

Me too, and the problem doesn´t stops with the SMPS. I have seen
enough motherboard failures caused by defective capacitors. In fact,
there is even a website www.badcaps.net dedicated to motherboard
failures caused by bad capacitors.

That wasnt due to deliberately designing the component to fail
just outside warrant and is just another example of bad design,
in this case the technology used to manufacture those caps.

A TV, or a computer monitor left on all the time will last less
time of course. A CRT has a definite lifespan, and if the monitor
or the TV set is a LCD based one, the CFL bulbs used to light up
the screen have a definite lifespan. Did you knew that, Mr. Know
Nothing ?

And certain parts ONLY fail on start-up because of power surges. Some
devices would run litterally forever if never shut off - others are
robust enough to handle starting and stopping but have finite life
devices. My experience with computer monitors (over 17 years) has
been those left on 24/7 generally outlast those that are started and
stopped several times a day. Phosphor burn used to be the major
problem with 24/7 operation. Today it is SMPS failure. I can't
remember the last monitor I had to replace due to CRT failure. My own
newest monitor is well over 5 years old now. It is generally never
turned off (just powers itself down when I leave)

That´s interesting. In my experience I have found that computer CRT
monitors left 24/7 on, tend to present an overall decrease in brightness
and focus in less than 4 years, and in some cases they get pretty unusable.

Mine didnt

The cheaper the monitor is, the worse is the effect.

Thats just plain wrong too.

Of course, turning it off/on constantly isn´t a good idea either.
Normally I set them to turn off automatically if the computer is
left unused for 1 hour.

I only turn them off overnight, and only because of the substantial
power use thats inevitable with big 19" CRT monitors.

ANd Hard drives that are never shut off generally DO last
significantly longer than those that get powered down (which
is why I disable power management on my servers). I have
a set of 10 year old scsi drives in one of the servers that will
likely go another 10 years if I don't scrap the server. That
server has not had a SINGLE FAILURE over those 10 years.
It cost about $10,000 new. The drives were likely over $1000
each. They are 8gb? The EIDE drive I just installed is 160gb
and cost $79.00. Will it last 10 years? Not likely!

I agree with that.

I dont on that last.

I too disable power management in my harddrives and
I haven´t had a single failure with them, and also I have
found that HDDs that are normally 24/7 ON lasts a lot longer,

So much for your previous claim. Most personal desktop systems
wont ever see anything like 50K start stops with the default
shutdown before MS changed the default with XP.

and when they fail, is normally because a bearing failure, for instance.

Not anymore. And you just said that you hadnt had any failures.

You cant have it both ways.

In the other hand, I usually replace the HDD´s
of my computer as soon as they get 5 years old.

More fool you.

There is no need to take unnecessary risks, specially
when the capacity of HDDs increases each year.

Anyone with a clue has adequate backups so there is no extra risk at all.

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 02:34:00 GMT, "Rick Brandt"
wrote:

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote:
On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 10:01:43 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:
It's the bean counters that dictate the quality or lack thereof that
makes the part failure prone in the first place, and glue is a lot
cheaper than screws. Moulded power cords, on the other hand, are not
only CHEAPER, but "more reliable" They are cheaper to make than just
the replaceable end itself because they are moulded in place.


Let's imagine that conversation...

BeanCounter: "Make the product cheaper"
Engineer: "Sure, what do you suggest?"
BeanCounter: "I have no idea. I'm an accountant, not an engineer!"
(at this point everyone at the meeting stops paying attention to the
BeanCounter)

Cost reduction is a *technical problem*, it cannot simply be mandated by fiat.
Every company is a bit different but I work at a company that manufactures
capital equipment and I can tell you that there are no accountants even invited
to these meetings. Ours (and many companies) are RUN by the engineering
departments. All other departments are considered "support".



That may be the case with "capital equipment" - it is not the case
with mass market consumer items, and even in the computer business.



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On 15 Jan 2007 19:55:19 -0800, "Too_Many_Tools"
wrote:


Most companies data isn't worth anything after only a handful of years.


Engineering data is the heart of a business.

Management often forgets that.

Then a competitor eats them alive.

TMT

RIGHT ON!!!!



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote
lsmartino wrote
Rod Speed wrote

Please explain how the manufacturer of a light bulb, fluorescent
lamp or CFL can provide an estimate of the lifetime of the lamp.

That is trivial to do by running an adequate sized batch of
incandescent light bulbs under appropriate test conditions etc.

Don´t say "They can´t because it´s impossible".
Explain exactly why it´s impossible.

Its up to those who claim that its possible to design a device
to die one year after the warrant expires how that can be done.

Well, it can be estimated how long will a power semiconductor
run if you leave it without a proper heatsink.

Not in a domestic environment it aint, because
the ambient temperature varys so much.

I got a bit of a start relatively recently when someone was having
overheating problems with their PC to discover that they were one
of the few in this area who were silly enough to have no form of
cooling whatever, not even a swamp cooler, in an area which can
see 10 days over 40C some summers. We had one just last week
and it got to 44C, and it was like walking into a furnace walking
outside my airconditioned house.

Open any Samsung TV, for instance, to see for yourself
how important transistors are left bare, dissipatting heat
to the air. I don´t see why it should be difficult for the
manufacturer to know that these particular transistors
left overheating will fail within a finite number of hours.

There is no finite number of hours, because the
ambient temp varys so much in domestic situations.

Those who dont have any cooling at all in an area which
can see a week over 40C wont survive the warranty
period and those who have decent air conditioning will
find that the TV lasts long past the warranty period.

Also, you will notice that the same circuit will have electrolytic
capacitors near heat sources, when it´s a well known fact that
heat shortens dramatically the life of electrolytics caps.

In practice that isnt a significant problem with domestic appliances.
Essentially because you dont see many electros in that situation
with them.

The manufacturer know how to properly design an electronic
circuit in order to provide a long life, but it also it knows how
to design it to fail within a short term under certain conditions,

No they dont on that silly claim about surviving the
warranty fine, but failing immediately after that expires.

and accordingly they estimate a warranty just long
enough to cover the product for a safe term, a
safe term for the manufacturer, not the user.

Have fun explaining how come not a single electronic device
I have ever owned has died just after the warranty has run out.

And that includes my latest gigantic widescreen TV too.

Of course it´s impossible to predict exactly how many years
the TV will last, but the manufacturer count with statistical
data which says, for instance, that a TV set is turned on
10 hours per day for instance, and taking that into account,
and estimating how long the weakest part of the TV will last
under these conditions, they can determine the warranty lapse.

Pity about the TVs that get left on all the time.

The claim is completely fanciful and those making that sort of
claim have obviously never actually designed a damned thing.

And only the stupidest manufacturer would deliberatly design
their product to die as soon as the warranty has expired
anyway, because the bulk of those who had bought such
a dud wouldnt be buying another from that manufacturer.

They also do product reliability testing to see
how long on average it is before a product fails.

No they dont with domestic appliances.

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

Yes they do.

No they dont.

They quote the useful lifetime of a hardrive in MTBF hours.

That is calculated, not measured. Convert that MTBF
to years and you will discover why they cant possibility
have tested them to get those numbers.

Don´t answer "it´s impossible" if you are not prepared to give
a real explanation. Samsung, Seagate, WD... any decent hard
drive manufactures gives an estimate lifetime of their products.
These estimates are provided in the datasheet of each harddrive.

And they are ESTIMATES, not measured results.

Exactly, these are estimates,

Pity the claim was about TESTING, which doesnt happen, like I said.

and most of the time very accurate,

Like hell it is. Have you actually tried converting
the MTBF of a current hard drive to years ?

The average quality EIDE drive has a published MTBF of
400,000 hours. That wouild be 45 years on my computer.

Yep, that's what I meant.

I've had LOTS that never made 3 years.

You arent cooling them properly.

If they test 1000 drives for 400 hours and get one failure, they have
their MTBF of 400,000 hours - 1 failure in 400,000 hours of running.

Nope, it aint measured like that.

They will actually do a larger test sample over
a larger time span Likely 2500 for 500 hours.

No they dont with mass market commodity drives.

That gives them 125,000,000 running hours and if they
have 3.125 failures they have a 400,000 hour MTBF.-

They dont determine the MTBF like that either.

but that's how the numbers are arrived at if they are not just
using statistical analysis methods.(predictive failure). Today's
hard drives with S.M.A.R.T. technology can predict their
failure date quite accurately. (using third party software).

Nope, they cant even consider the majority
of drives that fail with no prior indication of failure.

I just pulled 2 drives from service because they
predicted their own death in less than 60 days.

Bet they wouldnt have failed in that time.

That steaming turd gets it wrong much more often than it gets it right.

One was made on the 123rd day of 2003 (seagate),
the other the last day of January 2004 (wd).

Being a WD Caviar retail drive it has a 1 year warranty. If it
was a "distribution" drive, it would have a 3 year warranty.
Might have lasted 2 years - but I don't take a chance on my data.

Anyone with a clue has proper backups.

The Seagate has a 1 year warranty, and was in a computer
that only runs a few hours a week - and lasted less than 3 years.
I used to work for the (then) largest hard drive distributor in Canada.

But didnt manage to work out how the MTBF is determined.

specially those concerning the maximum number of startups/stops
the drive can tolerate before the heads get completely worn.

Wrong again. Its such a round number it cant have been produced
by TESTING, and the number of starts and stops dont produce
any wear of the heads with modern hard drives anyway.

I don´t want to imply that all manufacturers are dishonest per se,
but I can easily see how a given manufacturer can produce different
items, with differents level of quality of design and manufacture.
And these differences *will* impact the useful lifetime of the final product.

Separate matter entirely to the claim that they do reliability
TESTING with domestic appliances.

They dont, and dont with mass market hard drives either to
produce the MTBF or the number of start stop cycles either.

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.

Too_Many_Tools wrote:

Most companies data isn't worth anything after only a handful of years.

Engineering data is the heart of a business.

Not data thats a handful of years old.

Management often forgets that.

Then a competitor eats them alive.

Bet you cant list any examples of that with data thats older than a handful of years old.


Anthony Matonak wrote:
John Husvar wrote:
"Too_Many_Tools" wrote:
Archival storage of data is a BIG deal that the industry doesn't
like to talk about.

Most companies data isn't worth anything after only a handful of
years.

Well, I suppose one could print and store all all the data records
on acid-free paper and then physically go find the ones they wanted.
Shouldn't take more than a medium-sized army of clerks and only a
small hollowed mountain range for the storage.

The absolute best storage is microfilm or some variant of it.
You're pretty much assured that no matter what happens with
technology that you'll still be able to read it, even decades
later. You can buy computer microfilm printers. Direct print
to microfilm, no developing required.

Anthony

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote

Nokia has used several different battery standards. The 5100-6100
series uses the same battery, in Nicad, NiMh and Lithium flavours.
Other series of phones use different battery configurations.

Yes, primarily as a result of a change to the size and shape of the
phone that meant that the physical format and size of the battery
used with the 5***-6*** series was no longer suitable.

Much more sensible in this regard than Motorola and all the other
manufacturers.

That last is going too far.

Something about a northern european mentality - they actually THINK.

Nope. That came about for other reasons.

And some panasonic cordless phones use standard
AA NiMH or NiCad batterys, so it cant have a damned
thing to do with any northern european mentality.

Not talking cordless here. Talking cellular.

Pity its the cordless that shows its not northern european mentality.

Some cellphone companys actually allow the end user to
update the firmware in the phone. Nokia generally doesnt.

They do on their newer GSM phones.

I used the word generally for a reason.

I've actually got one that not only takes its own format battery,
but allows you to use AA batterys in an emergency, but that has
the real downside that its much thicker than current cellphones
and considerably bigger overall too.

My cordless phone does in fact use standard NiMH or NiCad AA
batterys, and its much thicker than most modern cellphones. Not as
important with a cordless which doesnt get carried around as much.

On the ipod nano it's just the simplicity of assembly that counts

Nope.

Please explain.

Its the tiny physical format that makes user changable batterys less
practical, particularly when you cant charge them outside the ipod easily.

There is no need to charge them outside the ipod if
all you want to do is make the ipod last longer than
the 2 year life of the current non-replaceable battery

Correct. But its quite feasible to replace the battery when it no longer
has an adequate charge retention, you dont have to throw the ipod away.

Cna't change tha battery on a Nano because
you can't buy one. Not even from Apple.

It hasnt been around long enough for there to be enough of a market yet.

There will be, you watch.

- it's crimped together, but not sealed, so if it gets wet it's finished,

It would be anyway even if the case was sealed, just like with cellphones.

and it IS possible to take it apart - but the battery is soldered
on, rather than plug-in, because it's simpler/cheaper.

Its obviously still possible to replace the battery.

Not if you can't get them, it isn't.

You'll be able to get them, just because of the volume of those sold.

Could still replace the battery - but they are NOT AVAILABLE.

NOT YET.

And by the time they are, the units will be obsolete.

Who cares if they still work fine ?

And if you get the beggars wet, the battery goes south.

Same with cellphones. There is no evil conspiracy,
its about producing a cost effective product.

I didn't say it was a conspiracy.

The OP did.

I said it was building as cheaply as possible (and often cheaper).

Have fun explaining why the absolute vast bulk of cellphones
can still be opened fine, and have replaceable covers etc.

No problem - they are designed with EXCHANGEABLE
batteries so you can go weeks between charging.

Doesnt explain the fact that you can dismantle the phone fine.

It would have been considerably cheaper to glue the phone
together and still have a removeable back that contains the battery.

see "vanity"

It would be easy to glue it together but still allow removeable covers.

Ever try to charge a cellphone battery out in the bush in West Africa?
- where you DO see cell phones miles and miles from any electrical power?

They werent designed for that unusual situation.

They sure were.

No they werent.

Cell phones were designed to be used where
it was inpractical to run wires. Power or phone.

Thats a microscopic part of the cellular market.

The batteries get swapped out in town and recharged there.
You get two with your phone and "bob's your uncle" Just drop
off dead ones and pick up charged ones - pay a small fee.

And you can also replace just the battery and not the entire
phone when the battery no longer holds the charge adequately.

That's a given. Cell phones are perhaps the best example,
in some ways, of how devices should be made.

So much for the mindlessly 'planned obsolescence' claim.

Its also and ideal market for that if it actually happened.

Particularly products from Nokia and a few others. Motorola
should have stuck to their power semiconductor and sensor
products, where they were the world standard instead of
concentrating on a field where they have proven to be
rather lackluster, quality wise.

Sure, but thats an entirely separate matter to what is being
discussed, the silly claim about planned obsolescence.

So much for the claim that the manufacturers deliberately force
you to replace the phone when you can just replace the battery.

I've never said that about Phones

But it would be where planned obsolescence would be rife if it actually happend.

- even tough the prices the companies charge for
cell phone batteries is nothing short of criminal.

I paid peanuts for a new battery for a pov's 5110. Nokia branded Lion too.

Also, cell phones are a "vanity item" so there is a large aftermarket
in customized cases for some brands. There are also MANY that
can not be readilly dissassembled beyond removing the battery.

Hardly any dont allow you to replace the battery when that is necessary.

Not talking about the battery - talking about faces/cases/etc.

They clearly dont bother to shaft the customer on the battery.

It's the bean-counters running the shop.

Have fun explaining why the absolute vast bulk of cellphones
can still be opened fine, and have replaceable covers etc.

I've worked for a company (computer industry) that was
quite successful until a harvard MBA type started "managing"
the company. It went from profitable to 1.5 million dollars
a year loss in 18 months. Was gone in 22.

Clearly hasnt happened with Apple, Nokia, etc etc etc.

It came VERY close to happening to Aapple.

Not for that reason. Different reason entirely, the same one that sank Commodore.

Just about got Gateway too.

Again, not for that reason.

Might still get HP/Compaq if they don't get their corporate
head out of (A) the sand or (B) their backsides.

Bet it wont.

We'll see.

We will indeed.

I give them mabee 5 years if they don't make some BIG changes.

They've made massive changes.

What happened to half the computer companies
that were in the market as little as 10 years ago?
The majority were micromanaged to death.

Nope, they died for other reasons. In the case of Commodore,
they were never going to survive once the bulk of their market
had moved off to dedicated games consoles.

Commodore built business and home computers too, not just game computers.

Yes, but they never stood a chance once the PC showed up.

Commodore was a business machine company to start with.

No news.

Same goes for Sperry Rand/Unisys.
Atari, I'll agree with you - but they had a computer that
was superior to the IBM PC of it's time (as did Sanyo)

And superiority was completely irrelevant, the market didnt care.

And they HAD to be superior to have any sales at all.

In the case of DEC, they were never going to survive
once the bulk of the market had moved to PCs.

In the case of IBM, they were never going to survive in the
personal PC market once the vast bulk of the market no
longer needed the security blanket of the IBM logo and
they never had a hope in hell of competing with Taiwan.

No reason they couldn't do like the rest and set up in taiwan.

Every reason, IBM is such a massive bureaucrasy that
they could never have hoped to compete that way.

They OWNED the PC market.

Not once the market didnt need the security blanket anymore.

And they blew all their feet right off with the PS/2s.

And then did it again TWICE with OS/2


Everett M. Greene wrote
Rod Speed writes
terry wrote

Although recent discussion/discovery that IPods will
exhaust their batteries in approximately one to two
years do clearly raise the question? "Designed to fail?".

Doesnt explain stuff like cordless phones that use standard
batterys.

What explains the electric toothbrushes that don't have
replaceable batteries? You have to toss a $60-$120
device just because a $5 battery has failed.

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Too_Many_Tools wrote

Most companies data isn't worth anything after only a handful of years.

Engineering data is the heart of a business.

Management often forgets that.

Then a competitor eats them alive.

RIGHT ON!!!!

FRAID NOT!!!!

Too_Many_Tools wrote:
Logan, I respect your opinion but ...

That seems a pet phrase, doesn't it? It would ring a lot less
hollow if you would show some sign that you're paying any attention or
thinking before spouting your rhetoric back, however...

...using a special case (DVD player) of
manufactured goods to prove your argument does not mean it applies to
other manufactured goods. The current DVD player situation is also an
example of market dumping.

What's special of a DVD player vis a vis any other relatively high or
high volume product? Absolutely nothing. And what "market dumping"?
It's nothing but a case of mass production is now so automated that
once a design is complete, the incremental cost of production is
minimal. The extreme is in something like CD's -- there's virtually no
actual value in the material item itself, the only value is the
"creative effort/talent".

Consumer electronics are considered to be "throw away"
electronics....and the continuing problems with their disposal is just
one of the symptoms of a larger problem with that industry segment.
Let's try saddling the manufacturers with the true cost to society and
see what the true price becomes.

What "true" cost? The cost of putting the Korean or Chinese factory
workers back on the collective, for example? There are locales which
have (in some cases, pretty stringent) requirements on the end user for
disposal of certain products. There are requirements (great or lesser,
depending on location and geopolitical forces) on manufacturing for
various compliances. These will gradually become more uniform globally
as time progresses. There is no way to even determine some mythical
"true" cost, what more impose it uniformly.

You are right that "throw away" electronics are optimized for low cost
of manufacture...and those savings are not passed on to the consumer.
It is like the low cost of labor that goes into the product....it is
used to maximize profit margin....while placing the burden on society.

No, no, no, and no.

For the most part, to say that any product is "optimized" for low cost
of manufacture is missing the actual target--what is attempted to be
optimized in almost all cases is an _overall_ cost-effective design,
manufacture and life-cycle cost. As others have noted, it is
counter-productive for most products to be so poorly designed and built
as to have a exceedingly short lifetime. Sony, for example, didn't get
to it's current position by making lousy stuff.

The savings that are passed on to the consumer are usually realized by
volume...the more you make the cheaper they get....when a number of
companies compete for your dollar.

But the only get cheaper in bulk by the very automation and
implementation of the design features you seem to decry. If every one
were still being built completely by hand and individual wiring
harnesses soldered by a zillion hands w/ hand irons, the incremental
cost wouldn't drop a nickel. It's only by investing -Billions- (with a
B) in large fab plants and automation combined w/ the manual labor that
these miracles of mass-production arise. See the history of Ford for
how that worked originally -- the same principles still apply, they've
just been move to the fab plants, etc., in the case of electronics. Or
consider the advance from discrete wiring to one-sided PCBs, to
multi-layer, to surface-wave, etc., ... Every one of those
developments to investments in engineering and capital to build the
production facilities and the end result was the overall reduction in
per-level-of complexity cost and increased reliability.

One telling symptom is when you look at those who get in financial
trouble by overextending their credit, one of the common areas where
they have overspent is in consumer electronics.

And how is that anybody else's fault but their own? Did somebody line
them up at Best Buy or Circuit City and force them to sign the sales
slip at gunpoint?
TMT


Logan Shaw wrote:
Too_Many_Tools wrote:
In my opinon...no.

I intentionally try to have older appliances, vehicles, machines to
lower repair costs and keep overall ownership cost to a minimum.

Your thoughts?

I don't think planned obsolescence is a good thing or a bad thing,
because in most cases it's fictional. Appliances and other items
you buy aren't designed to fail. They are designed to be cheap to
manufacture.

The article you mentioned quoted a repairman saying that lots of
new devices are made with circuit boards (rather than discrete
components). There's a reason for that. Circuits built with
circuit boards and integrated circuits cost much, much less to
produce than ones made of discrete components. Probably half
as much, maybe even less than that.

I'm not sure people understand how streamlined and optimized modern
manufacturing techniques are. The reason we get all these appliances
and electronics items for so cheap is the way they are made. To me,
it is truly remarkable that you can go to the store and buy a DVD
player for $30. It might only last 2 or 3 years, but 10 years ago,
it would have cost $10,000 to build an equivalent machine (just
because of the processing power).

So the question, to me, is this: do you want to buy a new item
for $100 and have it last 5 or 10 years, or do you want to spend
$200 for it and have it last 10 or 20? My answer would be that
I'd rather have the item that costs half as much and lasts half
as long. Why? Because I can take the $100 I saved and put it
in the bank. In 5 or 10 years when the item breaks, I can take
the $100 out of the bank, and it will have grown with interest
that has outpaced inflation, so it will be worth more than $100
in inflation-adjusted dollars, and at that time, the price of the
device may have gone down to less than $100 in inflation-adjusted
dollars, and it will certainly be more up to date (more energy
efficient, better support for new media formats, smaller, whatever).

To put it a slightly different way, for that $30 DVD player, it
costs something like $10 labor and $10 materials to put that thing
together in the first place (because there are packaging and shipping
costs and profit). So how efficient is it to spend $30 labor fixing
it? It isn't efficient. Repairing mass-produced items isn't
efficient because one person working on one item and doing everything
by hand simply doesn't have the same economies of scale that a
highly-optimized manufacturing environment has.

- Logan

On 15 Jan 2007 10:37:27 -0800, "Seerialmom"
wrote:


Ecnerwal wrote:
In article ,
"Rick Brandt" wrote:

This raises an apparent contradiction.

Perhaps you've not been adequately involved with your appliances to see
that there is not a contradiction, even "apparently".

The old ones were, for the most part, designed to be repairable. "This
part always breaks eventually, we'll isolate it and make it easy to
replace".

The new ones are, for the most part, designed NOT to be repairable,
and/or parts prices/availability are manipulated to render them
effectively non-economic to repair. "This part will (by design) break
about 1 year after the warranty runs out - let's put in in a monolithic
module containing all the most expensive parts of the machine." The
appliance industry would much rather sell you a new one than have you
fix the old one, and they have taken steps to ensure that only the
maddest of mad hatters will stubbornly stick to repair; and when they
do, the industry will still profit mightily due to inflated pricing. But
not making the parts at all will knock even the mad hatters into line
soon enough, so long as they keep all the parts adequately non-standard
that it's not economic for anyone to second-source them.

The same logic is driving the production of hybrid cars that are less
fuel efficient than some non-hybrid cars. When the battery pack dies in
8-10 years, the car will be junk (non-economic to repair), clearing the
way for more new car sales.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by

Your comments make a lot of sense to me. My dad built our first color
TV (and repaired it...usually running down to Thrifty Drug to use their
bulb tester); he would also rebuild cars (and was self-taught). The
appliances of the past were "simpler" as were our cars. Now that most
are running via circuit boards there's no more of the replace defective
fuse or plug thing (sometimes it is though...should still try that).
I'm also one of those who prefers the non-hybrid high MPG cars (in
order: 1 Fiesta, 2 Festiva's and currently 1 Yaris) for the specific
reasons you mention.

PS...if anyone has the answer about why one of my Sunbeam self-lowering
toasters doesn't want to stop toasting without pulling the plug (aka
which part is the thermostat?)...let me know It's not my primary
Sunbeam...just one I might need to use some day.


Simple bi-metal switch as part of the trigger mechanism of the popper
upper.

Which reminds me.. my lady friend bought me a Hot Dog toaster for
Christmas. You put the buns in each end vertically, and two hot dogs in
the center vertically and push down on the handle. Just like a real
toaster.

Works like a champ too. Nuking em is still easier..but this was a very
nice thought. I eat a lot of hot dogs..

Gunner

"Deep in her heart, every moslem woman yearns to show us her tits"
John Griffin

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:16:05 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
lsmartino wrote
Rod Speed wrote

They can do the estimate considering an ambient temperature of 20ºC -
25ºC. Check the datasheet of any semiconductor and learn something
before you write. Any rise in the temperature will shorten the
lifespan of the product. To me, that´s a quite profitable scenario.

Also, you will notice that the same circuit will have electrolytic
capacitors near heat sources, when it´s a well known fact that
heat shortens dramatically the life of electrolytics caps.

In practice that isnt a significant problem with domestic
appliances. Essentially because you dont see many
electros in that situation with them.

Are you crazy? Have you ever seen a modern SMPS? Try to tell all us
that a SMPS (Switched Mode Power Supply, in case you don´t know what
a SMPS is) don´t HAVE electrolytics caps, and that those caps doesn´t
have a finite lifespan. Even electrolytics are classified based on
their MBTF at certain temperatures. Again, try to find the datasheet
of some electrolitycs caps, and educate yourself.

And just about anything electronic today is using SMPSs

The manufacturer know how to properly design an electronic
circuit in order to provide a long life, but it also it knows how
to design it to fail within a short term under certain conditions,

No they dont on that silly claim about surviving the
warranty fine, but failing immediately after that expires.

I replace enought ATX computer SMPSs before they hit 3
years - many within 2, and too many within one. And they
are running, in many cases, on protected power supplies.

Irrelevant to the silly claim they are DESIGNED to fail just outside
the warranty so you will buy another from same manufacture.

No one is telling that the product will explode right after
the warranty expires, but that it can be designed to fail
within a short life span, especially with cheap products.

and accordingly they estimate a warranty just long
enough to cover the product for a safe term, a
safe term for the manufacturer, not the user.

Have fun explaining how come not a single electronic device
I have ever owned has died just after the warranty has run out.

And that includes my latest gigantic widescreen TV too.

Of course it´s impossible to predict exactly how many years
the TV will last, but the manufacturer count with statistical
data which says, for instance, that a TV set is turned on
10 hours per day for instance, and taking that into account,
and estimating how long the weakest part of the TV will last
under these conditions, they can determine the warranty lapse.

Pity about the TVs that get left on all the time.

A TV, or a computer monitor left on all the time will last less time
of course. A CRT has a definite lifespan, and if the monitor or the
TV set is a LCD based one, the CFL bulbs used to light up the screen
have a definite lifespan. Did you knew that, Mr. Know Nothing ?

And certain parts ONLY fail on start-up because of power surges.
Some devices would run litterally forever if never shut off - others
are robust enough to handle starting and stopping but have finite life
devices. My experience with computer monitors (over 17 years) has
been those left on 24/7 generally outlast those that are started and
stopped several times a day. Phosphor burn used to be the major
problem with 24/7 operation. Today it is SMPS failure. I can't
remember the last monitor I had to replace due to CRT failure.

Quite a few are uneconomic to repair due to an FBT failure, but again,
thats just bad design, not deliberately designing them to fail just outside
warranty so you will buy another from the same manufacturer.

My own newest monitor is well over 5 years old now. It is
generally never turned off (just powers itself down when I leave)

Yeah, I used to leave them on all the time and now turn them
off overnight, just because I now have a number of big 19"
monitors and the power consumption isnt trivial.

I dont turn the PCs off tho with the exception of the laptop.

The claim is completely fanciful and those making that sort of
claim have obviously never actually designed a damned thing.

And only the stupidest manufacturer would deliberatly design
their product to die as soon as the warranty has expired
anyway, because the bulk of those who had bought such
a dud wouldnt be buying another from that manufacturer.

How many people who owned Chevy Vegas
bought a second one? THOUSANDS.

Bugger all that had one blow up their face.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Before I
stasrted innthe computer business I had 25 years under my belt in the
automotive service industry. Ten of those years as a service manager.
I was in the industry when the Vega was produced and sold. I saw them
fail. I saw the owners buying new vegas. I saw them buying no Chevies
after the vega was no longer made. They bought Chevy Cavaliers ten and
15 years later. They bought new ones when the head gaskets blew and
the heads cracked. Man, it takes a lot of bad Ju-Ju to get a died in
the wool Chevy man to switch brand loyalty!!!!!!

Now there ARE lots of people who will buy anything - don't mater who
made it - but in North America there are Ford people who will never
own anything BUT a Ford. There are Chevy people who would never buy a
Pontiac or a Buick. Make any sense? Nope.
Even people who quit buying Chrysler products when they could no
longer buy a Plymouth. Buy a Dodge? Not on your life.Old habits die
hard - particularly with old guys and cars.

And how many who bought Vega bought another Chevy?
Thousands and thousands and tens of thousands.

Bugger all that had one blow up their face.

And the average Vega did NOT make it through warranty.

Irrelevant with cars where most expect to need to make warranty
claims before the Japs put a bomb under the US manufacturers.

How many people who had their Cadillacs in the shop
more than in their driveway bought another Cadillac? Thousands.

Sure, there are a few niche markets with buyers that stupid.

Jaguar in spades. Aston Martins, etc etc etc.

And a few, after the second or third, got smart and bought a Lexus.

Yep, clearly most buyers noticed how the Japs had
put a bomb under the US manufacturers and got a clue.

Happened to Rolls Royce too.

It took a friend 7 or 8 Caddies over 3 years to finally make the
change. He figured it had to just be his luck untill he talked to
enough other owners to be convinced it was the CAR, not him.

Sure, there will always be some that stupid.

Doesnt happen much with domestic appliances tho.

Plenty have decided that Sony products are now steaming turds to be avoided.

Tell that to the manufacturer of Coby products, for instance.
They have quite a long time selling trash that fails quite quickly.

They quote the useful lifetime of a hardrive in MTBF hours.

That is calculated, not measured. Convert that MTBF
to years and you will discover why they cant possibility
have tested them to get those numbers.

Don´t answer "it´s impossible" if you are not prepared to give
a real explanation. Samsung, Seagate, WD... any decent hard
drive manufactures gives an estimate lifetime of their products.
These estimates are provided in the datasheet of each harddrive.

And they are ESTIMATES, not measured results.

Educated guesses. Finite Element Analysis.
Pretty accurate predictive methodology.

And NOT the claimed TESTING.

Exactly, these are estimates,

Pity the claim was about TESTING, which doesnt happen, like I said.

and most of the time very accurate,

Like hell it is. Have you actually tried converting
the MTBF of a current hard drive to years ?

It can be something like 15 years or more of constant
use, without a stop. And I have seen hard drives
surviving at least more than 10 years of hard work.

specially those concerning the maximum number of startups/stops
the drive can tolerate before the heads get completely worn.

Wrong again. Its such a round number it cant have been produced
by TESTING, and the number of starts and stops dont produce
any wear of the heads with modern hard drives anyway.

You are wrong again. When the platters stops, the heads contact the
platters. While the platters are spinning at full speed, the heads
are separated from them by a small air cushion formed by the
rotational speed of the platter. As soon the HDD is turned off, the
platters loses speed, and eventually the air cushion dissapear, thus
the heads make contact with the platters. The same happens in
reverse sequence when the HDD starts. That´s why start / stop cicles
have a definite impact in any HDD. Have you ever wondered why a HDD
last less in a home environment than in a office environment?

ANd Hard drives that are never shut off generally DO last
significantly longer than those that get powered down

They do indeed.

(which is why I disable power management on my servers).

I do on all systems except laptops where it does help time on battery.

And even MS has noticed and thats the default now with XP with desktops.

I have a set of 10 year old scsi drives in one of the servers that will likely
go another 10 years if I don't scrap the server. That server has not had
a SINGLE FAILURE over those 10 years. It cost about $10,000 new.
The drives were likely over $1000 each. They are 8gb?
The EIDE drive I just installed is 160gb and cost $79.00. Will it last
10 years? Not likely!

Bet it will or more strictly last till it gets discarded because its too small or too slow.

I've only ever had one PC hard drive failure, and thats with a hell of a lot of drives.

Not a shred of evidence that anyone is actually stupid enough
to deliberately attempt to design a drive which fails just outside
warranty to be replaced by another from the same manufacturer.

The spectacular duds the PC industry has seen, the IBM 75GXPs,
the 60GXPs, the Fujitsu MPGs etc have all been massive footshots
that were unintended, like most footshots are.



--
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On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:39:18 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote
lsmartino wrote
Rod Speed wrote

Please explain how the manufacturer of a light bulb, fluorescent
lamp or CFL can provide an estimate of the lifetime of the lamp.

That is trivial to do by running an adequate sized batch of
incandescent light bulbs under appropriate test conditions etc.

Don´t say "They can´t because it´s impossible".
Explain exactly why it´s impossible.

Its up to those who claim that its possible to design a device
to die one year after the warrant expires how that can be done.

Well, it can be estimated how long will a power semiconductor
run if you leave it without a proper heatsink.

Not in a domestic environment it aint, because
the ambient temperature varys so much.

I got a bit of a start relatively recently when someone was having
overheating problems with their PC to discover that they were one
of the few in this area who were silly enough to have no form of
cooling whatever, not even a swamp cooler, in an area which can
see 10 days over 40C some summers. We had one just last week
and it got to 44C, and it was like walking into a furnace walking
outside my airconditioned house.

Open any Samsung TV, for instance, to see for yourself
how important transistors are left bare, dissipatting heat
to the air. I don´t see why it should be difficult for the
manufacturer to know that these particular transistors
left overheating will fail within a finite number of hours.

There is no finite number of hours, because the
ambient temp varys so much in domestic situations.

Those who dont have any cooling at all in an area which
can see a week over 40C wont survive the warranty
period and those who have decent air conditioning will
find that the TV lasts long past the warranty period.

Also, you will notice that the same circuit will have electrolytic
capacitors near heat sources, when it´s a well known fact that
heat shortens dramatically the life of electrolytics caps.

In practice that isnt a significant problem with domestic appliances.
Essentially because you dont see many electros in that situation
with them.

The manufacturer know how to properly design an electronic
circuit in order to provide a long life, but it also it knows how
to design it to fail within a short term under certain conditions,

No they dont on that silly claim about surviving the
warranty fine, but failing immediately after that expires.

and accordingly they estimate a warranty just long
enough to cover the product for a safe term, a
safe term for the manufacturer, not the user.

Have fun explaining how come not a single electronic device
I have ever owned has died just after the warranty has run out.

And that includes my latest gigantic widescreen TV too.

Of course it´s impossible to predict exactly how many years
the TV will last, but the manufacturer count with statistical
data which says, for instance, that a TV set is turned on
10 hours per day for instance, and taking that into account,
and estimating how long the weakest part of the TV will last
under these conditions, they can determine the warranty lapse.

Pity about the TVs that get left on all the time.

The claim is completely fanciful and those making that sort of
claim have obviously never actually designed a damned thing.

And only the stupidest manufacturer would deliberatly design
their product to die as soon as the warranty has expired
anyway, because the bulk of those who had bought such
a dud wouldnt be buying another from that manufacturer.

They also do product reliability testing to see
how long on average it is before a product fails.

No they dont with domestic appliances.

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

Yes they do.

No they dont.

They quote the useful lifetime of a hardrive in MTBF hours.

That is calculated, not measured. Convert that MTBF
to years and you will discover why they cant possibility
have tested them to get those numbers.

Don´t answer "it´s impossible" if you are not prepared to give
a real explanation. Samsung, Seagate, WD... any decent hard
drive manufactures gives an estimate lifetime of their products.
These estimates are provided in the datasheet of each harddrive.

And they are ESTIMATES, not measured results.

Exactly, these are estimates,

Pity the claim was about TESTING, which doesnt happen, like I said.

and most of the time very accurate,

Like hell it is. Have you actually tried converting
the MTBF of a current hard drive to years ?

The average quality EIDE drive has a published MTBF of
400,000 hours. That wouild be 45 years on my computer.

Yep, that's what I meant.

I've had LOTS that never made 3 years.

You arent cooling them properly.

BS. They have NEVER gone over 40 degrees C. They live year round
between 65 and 72 degrees F (talking about my own systems) They start
losing sectors after about a year, and reach the undependable stage
after 2 or three. Some last 2 years, and some are still going after 7.
I've even got a Fujitsu MPG still running, and doing just fine (that's
one out of well over 100 I put into service)

If they test 1000 drives for 400 hours and get one failure, they have
their MTBF of 400,000 hours - 1 failure in 400,000 hours of running.

Nope, it aint measured like that.

They will actually do a larger test sample over
a larger time span Likely 2500 for 500 hours.

No they dont with mass market commodity drives.

Give it up.

That gives them 125,000,000 running hours and if they
have 3.125 failures they have a 400,000 hour MTBF.-

They dont determine the MTBF like that either.

but that's how the numbers are arrived at if they are not just
using statistical analysis methods.(predictive failure). Today's
hard drives with S.M.A.R.T. technology can predict their
failure date quite accurately. (using third party software).

Nope, they cant even consider the majority
of drives that fail with no prior indication of failure.
Other than bearing failure (which CAN cause S.M.A.R.T. to find
anomolies) and drive electronics failures,(which generally do not, as
they fail "hard") they can and DO predict failure before any "prior
indication of failure"

I just pulled 2 drives from service because they
predicted their own death in less than 60 days.

Bet they wouldnt have failed in that time.
My time to restore the sytem is worth more than the replacement drive,
so I replace when it says there is a problem. Tried stretching a
laptop drive that said there was a problem developing and had to
replace it and do a complete restore less than 2 weeks later.

That steaming turd gets it wrong much more often than it gets it right.

One was made on the 123rd day of 2003 (seagate),
the other the last day of January 2004 (wd).

Being a WD Caviar retail drive it has a 1 year warranty. If it
was a "distribution" drive, it would have a 3 year warranty.
Might have lasted 2 years - but I don't take a chance on my data.

Anyone with a clue has proper backups.
Yup - have backups of all the data. Still have to re-install all the
OS and programs, along with the myriad updates and patches.

Also, when is the last time you actually TESTED your backup? I test
mine, but the majority have "blind faith" untill the time comes that
they NEED to restore. Restoration of the drive can also take the
better part of a day of downtime, while preventative replacement can
take as little as a couple hours in off-time.

The Seagate has a 1 year warranty, and was in a computer
that only runs a few hours a week - and lasted less than 3 years.
I used to work for the (then) largest hard drive distributor in Canada.

But didnt manage to work out how the MTBF is determined.

specially those concerning the maximum number of startups/stops
the drive can tolerate before the heads get completely worn.

Wrong again. Its such a round number it cant have been produced
by TESTING, and the number of starts and stops dont produce
any wear of the heads with modern hard drives anyway.

I don´t want to imply that all manufacturers are dishonest per se,
but I can easily see how a given manufacturer can produce different
items, with differents level of quality of design and manufacture.
And these differences *will* impact the useful lifetime of the final product.

Separate matter entirely to the claim that they do reliability
TESTING with domestic appliances.

They dont, and dont with mass market hard drives either to
produce the MTBF or the number of start stop cycles either.



--
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On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:50:03 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

Too_Many_Tools wrote:

Most companies data isn't worth anything after only a handful of years.

Engineering data is the heart of a business.

Not data thats a handful of years old.

Management often forgets that.

Then a competitor eats them alive.

Bet you cant list any examples of that with data thats older than a handful of years old.

I sure can. I milwright designs a feed mill. Back in 1966. He rebuilds
that mill in 1981. He builds 5 more mills between those dates, and
onother 12 since.
His office burns down and he loses all his engineering drawings.or the
drawings get soaked when a pipe breaks. How much were those
engineering drawings from 1965 worth today?
Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Another firm with current engineering drawings will eat him alive when
a new mill is up for tender.
That's why he invests in a large format scanner and enters ALL the old
drawings into cad, at very high cost, and keeps 2 offsite backups.

Or take a land surveyor's office.
ALL the surveys done in the past 35+ years are kept onsite, and many
are referred to daily to tie in new surveys etc. What would it cost to
regenerate even a small fraction of those survey plans? What is their
current value??? Significantly higher than the original cost to
produce the survey.


Anthony Matonak wrote:
John Husvar wrote:
"Too_Many_Tools" wrote:
Archival storage of data is a BIG deal that the industry doesn't
like to talk about.

Most companies data isn't worth anything after only a handful of
years.

Well, I suppose one could print and store all all the data records
on acid-free paper and then physically go find the ones they wanted.
Shouldn't take more than a medium-sized army of clerks and only a
small hollowed mountain range for the storage.

The absolute best storage is microfilm or some variant of it.
You're pretty much assured that no matter what happens with
technology that you'll still be able to read it, even decades
later. You can buy computer microfilm printers. Direct print
to microfilm, no developing required.

Anthony



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

I got one of those for free because the motor controller had failed and
the repair was supposed to cost $400.


The Neputune washer is a typical case of how companies plan for
enforced obscelence.

Make the repair cost so high that you are forced to buy another
appliance.

Their mistake is that many of the problems surfaced during the warranty
period.

Their other mistake was to outsource much of the design to consultants
who took their money and ran leaving the company with a poor design
that was rushed to production.

The CEO and MBAs still got their bonuses as the company sank.

TMT

James Sweet wrote:
A friend bought a brand new Neptune washer that didn't last a month.
The dealer had to replace it TWICE before he had one that lasted over a
month.




I got one of those for free because the motor controller had failed and
the repair was supposed to cost $400. I got lucky and touching up a few
cracked solder joints fixed it. Another I got I wasn't quite so lucky
with and some of the mosfets had shorted which in turn took out just
about every semi on the board including the big custom chip. They used
underrated triacs on the upper control board as well and I've fixed a
number of those which were burned out by out of spec door lock motors.

There's been various attempts over the years at marketing easily
upgradeable computers, but invariably by the time you were ready to
upgrade, the cost of a new CPU module was a sizable portion of the cost
of a whole new PC, as well as the rest of the major components were
showing their age.


The upgrade of electronics would not be a significant cost if the true
cost of a computer was borne by the company and not the public.

We keep hearing how the economy of electronics lowers the cost of a
product but one of the greatest costs to society is the cost of
production, distribution and disposal of electronic items.

It occurs because it is allowed to occur.

TMT
James Sweet wrote:

And I want to add something about "planned obsolescence" because it
is often misused. If people are choosing to buy cheap, it's hardly
that the manufacturers are making things so they will break. The
consumer often wants that cheaper tv set or VCR.



Rather than planned obsolescence, it's normally more a case of how many
cost reducing corners can they cut and still have it last "long enough".
It's hard to blame the manufactures, they're supplying what the average
consumer is demanding.



If my computer from 1979 had been intended to last forever, it would
have been way out of range in terms of price. Because they'd have to
anticipate how much things would change, and build in enough so upgrading
would be doable. So you'd spend money on potential, rather than spending
money later on a new computer that would beat out what they could
imagine in 1979. And in recent years, it is the consumer who is deciding
to buy a new computer every few years (whether a deliberate decision or
they simply let the manufacturer lead, must vary from person to person.)



There's been various attempts over the years at marketing easily
upgradeable computers, but invariably by the time you were ready to
upgrade, the cost of a new CPU module was a sizable portion of the cost
of a whole new PC, as well as the rest of the major components were
showing their age.

TO the skeptics of the "planned obsolescence" and "designed to fail"
theory, I have a simple suggestion.

Take household machines from trash and take them apart. Look for
signs of above mentioned behaviours -- and you will find plenty. Such
as parts that are obviously designed to fail.


i

I am surprised that others have not responded to Ig's idea...it is an
excellent one.

Like an archaeologist, one can study the decline and fall of
manufacturing by studying discarded goods.

It is very apparent when one does this as to how many goods have turned
from good implementations to crap.

The end result forces the consumer to spend more money on goods that
would not need to be purchased.

And it is intentional.

TMT

Ignoramus16071 wrote:
TO the skeptics of the "planned obsolescence" and "designed to fail"
theory, I have a simple suggestion.

Take household machines from trash and take them apart. Look for
signs of above mentioned behaviours -- and you will find plenty. Such
as parts that are obviously designed to fail.


i

dpb wrote:
Too_Many_Tools wrote:
Logan, I respect your opinion but ...

That seems a pet phrase, doesn't it? It would ring a lot less
hollow if you would show some sign that you're paying any attention or
thinking before spouting your rhetoric back, however...


It would seem that you are a stranger to good manners...and would not
know the truth if it bit you on the butt.

The current DVD sales are a typical case of market dumping...happens
all the time.

Get back to me in a few years and let's talk about how many DVD sets
are being trashed because of failures.

Ask any repair person how the quality of VHS players have declined over
the years...the same goes with DVD units. I have some older DVD units
that cost serious money and their internal design is excellent. The
newer units are built with intended obselescene in mind...in other
words they are built like crap. Guess which ones will be running a few
years from now? You might want to check the numbers on returns of DOA
units also....many of the currently cheap units don't work out of the
box.

And oh...one more thing...are you posting from China?

TMT
dpb wrote:
Too_Many_Tools wrote:
Logan, I respect your opinion but ...

That seems a pet phrase, doesn't it? It would ring a lot less
hollow if you would show some sign that you're paying any attention or
thinking before spouting your rhetoric back, however...

...using a special case (DVD player) of
manufactured goods to prove your argument does not mean it applies to
other manufactured goods. The current DVD player situation is also an
example of market dumping.

What's special of a DVD player vis a vis any other relatively high or
high volume product? Absolutely nothing. And what "market dumping"?
It's nothing but a case of mass production is now so automated that
once a design is complete, the incremental cost of production is
minimal. The extreme is in something like CD's -- there's virtually no
actual value in the material item itself, the only value is the
"creative effort/talent".

Consumer electronics are considered to be "throw away"
electronics....and the continuing problems with their disposal is just
one of the symptoms of a larger problem with that industry segment.
Let's try saddling the manufacturers with the true cost to society and
see what the true price becomes.

What "true" cost? The cost of putting the Korean or Chinese factory
workers back on the collective, for example? There are locales which
have (in some cases, pretty stringent) requirements on the end user for
disposal of certain products. There are requirements (great or lesser,
depending on location and geopolitical forces) on manufacturing for
various compliances. These will gradually become more uniform globally
as time progresses. There is no way to even determine some mythical
"true" cost, what more impose it uniformly.

You are right that "throw away" electronics are optimized for low cost
of manufacture...and those savings are not passed on to the consumer.
It is like the low cost of labor that goes into the product....it is
used to maximize profit margin....while placing the burden on society.

No, no, no, and no.

For the most part, to say that any product is "optimized" for low cost
of manufacture is missing the actual target--what is attempted to be
optimized in almost all cases is an _overall_ cost-effective design,
manufacture and life-cycle cost. As others have noted, it is
counter-productive for most products to be so poorly designed and built
as to have a exceedingly short lifetime. Sony, for example, didn't get
to it's current position by making lousy stuff.

The savings that are passed on to the consumer are usually realized by
volume...the more you make the cheaper they get....when a number of
companies compete for your dollar.

But the only get cheaper in bulk by the very automation and
implementation of the design features you seem to decry. If every one
were still being built completely by hand and individual wiring
harnesses soldered by a zillion hands w/ hand irons, the incremental
cost wouldn't drop a nickel. It's only by investing -Billions- (with a
B) in large fab plants and automation combined w/ the manual labor that
these miracles of mass-production arise. See the history of Ford for
how that worked originally -- the same principles still apply, they've
just been move to the fab plants, etc., in the case of electronics. Or
consider the advance from discrete wiring to one-sided PCBs, to
multi-layer, to surface-wave, etc., ... Every one of those
developments to investments in engineering and capital to build the
production facilities and the end result was the overall reduction in
per-level-of complexity cost and increased reliability.

One telling symptom is when you look at those who get in financial
trouble by overextending their credit, one of the common areas where
they have overspent is in consumer electronics.

And how is that anybody else's fault but their own? Did somebody line
them up at Best Buy or Circuit City and force them to sign the sales
slip at gunpoint?
TMT


Logan Shaw wrote:
Too_Many_Tools wrote:
In my opinon...no.

I intentionally try to have older appliances, vehicles, machines to
lower repair costs and keep overall ownership cost to a minimum.

Your thoughts?

I don't think planned obsolescence is a good thing or a bad thing,
because in most cases it's fictional. Appliances and other items
you buy aren't designed to fail. They are designed to be cheap to
manufacture.

The article you mentioned quoted a repairman saying that lots of
new devices are made with circuit boards (rather than discrete
components). There's a reason for that. Circuits built with
circuit boards and integrated circuits cost much, much less to
produce than ones made of discrete components. Probably half
as much, maybe even less than that.

I'm not sure people understand how streamlined and optimized modern
manufacturing techniques are. The reason we get all these appliances
and electronics items for so cheap is the way they are made. To me,
it is truly remarkable that you can go to the store and buy a DVD
player for $30. It might only last 2 or 3 years, but 10 years ago,
it would have cost $10,000 to build an equivalent machine (just
because of the processing power).

So the question, to me, is this: do you want to buy a new item
for $100 and have it last 5 or 10 years, or do you want to spend
$200 for it and have it last 10 or 20? My answer would be that
I'd rather have the item that costs half as much and lasts half
as long. Why? Because I can take the $100 I saved and put it
in the bank. In 5 or 10 years when the item breaks, I can take
the $100 out of the bank, and it will have grown with interest
that has outpaced inflation, so it will be worth more than $100
in inflation-adjusted dollars, and at that time, the price of the
device may have gone down to less than $100 in inflation-adjusted
dollars, and it will certainly be more up to date (more energy
efficient, better support for new media formats, smaller, whatever).

To put it a slightly different way, for that $30 DVD player, it
costs something like $10 labor and $10 materials to put that thing
together in the first place (because there are packaging and shipping
costs and profit). So how efficient is it to spend $30 labor fixing
it? It isn't efficient. Repairing mass-produced items isn't
efficient because one person working on one item and doing everything
by hand simply doesn't have the same economies of scale that a
highly-optimized manufacturing environment has.

- Logan

Too_Many_Tools wrote:

I got one of those for free because the motor controller
had failed and the repair was supposed to cost $400.

The Neputune washer is a typical case of how
companies plan for enforced obscelence.

Nope, its just another example of lousy design.

Make the repair cost so high that you are forced to buy another appliance.

Their mistake is that many of the problems surfaced during the warranty period.

You're mangling two entirely separate issues here.

Their other mistake was to outsource much of the design
to consultants who took their money and ran leaving the
company with a poor design that was rushed to production.

And there too.

The CEO and MBAs still got their bonuses as the company sank.

You dont know that they got a bonus at all with that obscenity.


James Sweet wrote:
A friend bought a brand new Neptune washer that didn't last a
month. The dealer had to replace it TWICE before he had one that
lasted over a month.




I got one of those for free because the motor controller had failed
and the repair was supposed to cost $400. I got lucky and touching
up a few cracked solder joints fixed it. Another I got I wasn't
quite so lucky with and some of the mosfets had shorted which in
turn took out just about every semi on the board including the big
custom chip. They used underrated triacs on the upper control board
as well and I've fixed a number of those which were burned out by
out of spec door lock motors.

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote:
On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:16:05 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
lsmartino wrote
Rod Speed wrote

They can do the estimate considering an ambient temperature of
20ºC - 25ºC. Check the datasheet of any semiconductor and learn
something before you write. Any rise in the temperature will
shorten the lifespan of the product. To me, that´s a quite
profitable scenario.

Also, you will notice that the same circuit will have
electrolytic capacitors near heat sources, when it´s a well
known fact that heat shortens dramatically the life of
electrolytics caps.

In practice that isnt a significant problem with domestic
appliances. Essentially because you dont see many
electros in that situation with them.

Are you crazy? Have you ever seen a modern SMPS? Try to tell all us
that a SMPS (Switched Mode Power Supply, in case you don´t know
what a SMPS is) don´t HAVE electrolytics caps, and that those caps
doesn´t have a finite lifespan. Even electrolytics are classified
based on their MBTF at certain temperatures. Again, try to find
the datasheet of some electrolitycs caps, and educate yourself.

And just about anything electronic today is using SMPSs

The manufacturer know how to properly design an electronic
circuit in order to provide a long life, but it also it knows how
to design it to fail within a short term under certain
conditions,

No they dont on that silly claim about surviving the
warranty fine, but failing immediately after that expires.

I replace enought ATX computer SMPSs before they hit 3
years - many within 2, and too many within one. And they
are running, in many cases, on protected power supplies.

Irrelevant to the silly claim they are DESIGNED to fail just outside
the warranty so you will buy another from same manufacture.

No one is telling that the product will explode right after
the warranty expires, but that it can be designed to fail
within a short life span, especially with cheap products.

and accordingly they estimate a warranty just long
enough to cover the product for a safe term, a
safe term for the manufacturer, not the user.

Have fun explaining how come not a single electronic device
I have ever owned has died just after the warranty has run out.

And that includes my latest gigantic widescreen TV too.

Of course it´s impossible to predict exactly how many years
the TV will last, but the manufacturer count with statistical
data which says, for instance, that a TV set is turned on
10 hours per day for instance, and taking that into account,
and estimating how long the weakest part of the TV will last
under these conditions, they can determine the warranty lapse.

Pity about the TVs that get left on all the time.

A TV, or a computer monitor left on all the time will last less
time of course. A CRT has a definite lifespan, and if the monitor
or the TV set is a LCD based one, the CFL bulbs used to light up
the screen have a definite lifespan. Did you knew that, Mr. Know
Nothing ?

And certain parts ONLY fail on start-up because of power surges.
Some devices would run litterally forever if never shut off - others
are robust enough to handle starting and stopping but have finite
life devices. My experience with computer monitors (over 17 years)
has
been those left on 24/7 generally outlast those that are started and
stopped several times a day. Phosphor burn used to be the major
problem with 24/7 operation. Today it is SMPS failure. I can't
remember the last monitor I had to replace due to CRT failure.

Quite a few are uneconomic to repair due to an FBT failure, but
again,
thats just bad design, not deliberately designing them to fail just
outside
warranty so you will buy another from the same manufacturer.

My own newest monitor is well over 5 years old now. It is
generally never turned off (just powers itself down when I leave)

Yeah, I used to leave them on all the time and now turn them
off overnight, just because I now have a number of big 19"
monitors and the power consumption isnt trivial.

I dont turn the PCs off tho with the exception of the laptop.

The claim is completely fanciful and those making that sort of
claim have obviously never actually designed a damned thing.

And only the stupidest manufacturer would deliberatly design
their product to die as soon as the warranty has expired
anyway, because the bulk of those who had bought such
a dud wouldnt be buying another from that manufacturer.

How many people who owned Chevy Vegas
bought a second one? THOUSANDS.

Bugger all that had one blow up their face.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

We'll see...

Before I stasrted innthe computer business I had 25
years under my belt in the automotive service industry.
Ten of those years as a service manager.

Irrelevant to whats involved with repeat car purchases.

I was in the industry when the Vega
was produced and sold. I saw them fail.

Failure UNDER WARRANTY is an entirely different issue to
failure just outside the warranty, with a product designed to
do that so the failure rate just outside warranty is very high.

That didnt happen with the vegas.

AND car buyers came to expect problems covered by
warranty with the steaming turd the US car industry became.

I saw the owners buying new vegas.

But NOT when the car was DESIGNED TO FAIL JUST OUTSIDE WARRANTY.

I saw them buying no Chevies after the vega was no longer made.
They bought Chevy Cavaliers ten and 15 years later. They bought
new ones when the head gaskets blew and the heads cracked.
Man, it takes a lot of bad Ju-Ju to get a died in
the wool Chevy man to switch brand loyalty!!!!!!

The car industry has always been different with
some chosing to turnover their cars are a high rate.

Now there ARE lots of people who will buy anything - don't
mater who made it - but in North America there are Ford
people who will never own anything BUT a Ford. There are
Chevy people who would never buy a Pontiac or a Buick.

That happens everywhere.

Make any sense? Nope. Even people who quit buying Chrysler
products when they could no longer buy a Plymouth. Buy a Dodge?
Not on your life.Old habits die hard - particularly with old guys and cars.

Doesnt happen much with other domestic appliances.

And how many who bought Vega bought another Chevy?
Thousands and thousands and tens of thousands.

Bugger all that had one blow up their face.

And the average Vega did NOT make it through warranty.

Irrelevant with cars where most expect to need to make warranty
claims before the Japs put a bomb under the US manufacturers.

How many people who had their Cadillacs in the shop
more than in their driveway bought another Cadillac? Thousands.

Sure, there are a few niche markets with buyers that stupid.

Jaguar in spades. Aston Martins, etc etc etc.

And a few, after the second or third, got smart and bought a Lexus.

Yep, clearly most buyers noticed how the Japs had
put a bomb under the US manufacturers and got a clue.

Happened to Rolls Royce too.

It took a friend 7 or 8 Caddies over 3 years to finally make the
change. He figured it had to just be his luck untill he talked to
enough other owners to be convinced it was the CAR, not him.

Sure, there will always be some that stupid.

Doesnt happen much with domestic appliances tho.

Plenty have decided that Sony products are now steaming turds to be
avoided.

Tell that to the manufacturer of Coby products, for instance.
They have quite a long time selling trash that fails quite quickly.

They quote the useful lifetime of a hardrive in MTBF hours.

That is calculated, not measured. Convert that MTBF
to years and you will discover why they cant possibility
have tested them to get those numbers.

Don´t answer "it´s impossible" if you are not prepared to give
a real explanation. Samsung, Seagate, WD... any decent hard
drive manufactures gives an estimate lifetime of their
products. These estimates are provided in the datasheet of
each harddrive.

And they are ESTIMATES, not measured results.

Educated guesses. Finite Element Analysis.
Pretty accurate predictive methodology.

And NOT the claimed TESTING.

Exactly, these are estimates,

Pity the claim was about TESTING, which doesnt happen, like I
said.

and most of the time very accurate,

Like hell it is. Have you actually tried converting
the MTBF of a current hard drive to years ?

It can be something like 15 years or more of constant
use, without a stop. And I have seen hard drives
surviving at least more than 10 years of hard work.

specially those concerning the maximum number of startups/stops
the drive can tolerate before the heads get completely worn.

Wrong again. Its such a round number it cant have been produced
by TESTING, and the number of starts and stops dont produce
any wear of the heads with modern hard drives anyway.

You are wrong again. When the platters stops, the heads contact the
platters. While the platters are spinning at full speed, the heads
are separated from them by a small air cushion formed by the
rotational speed of the platter. As soon the HDD is turned off, the
platters loses speed, and eventually the air cushion dissapear,
thus the heads make contact with the platters. The same happens in
reverse sequence when the HDD starts. That´s why start / stop
cicles have a definite impact in any HDD. Have you ever wondered
why a HDD last less in a home environment than in a office
environment?

ANd Hard drives that are never shut off generally DO last
significantly longer than those that get powered down

They do indeed.

(which is why I disable power management on my servers).

I do on all systems except laptops where it does help time on
battery.

And even MS has noticed and thats the default now with XP with
desktops.

I have a set of 10 year old scsi drives in one of the servers that
will likely go another 10 years if I don't scrap the server. That
server has not had
a SINGLE FAILURE over those 10 years. It cost about $10,000 new.
The drives were likely over $1000 each. They are 8gb?
The EIDE drive I just installed is 160gb and cost $79.00. Will it
last 10 years? Not likely!

Bet it will or more strictly last till it gets discarded because its
too small or too slow.

I've only ever had one PC hard drive failure, and thats with a hell
of a lot of drives.

Not a shred of evidence that anyone is actually stupid enough
to deliberately attempt to design a drive which fails just outside
warranty to be replaced by another from the same manufacturer.

The spectacular duds the PC industry has seen, the IBM 75GXPs,
the 60GXPs, the Fujitsu MPGs etc have all been massive footshots
that were unintended, like most footshots are.