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Firms Get Away with Selling Untested DRAM
peppytech75 writes "Melanie Hollands in IT Manager's Journal reports that 'In recent months, some Asian DRAM memory manufacturers have been getting away with selling untested ("UTT") DRAMs. Disturbingly, the practice seems to be getting traction at the lower portion of the module business. This is being done mostly by Taiwanese DRAM makers, who are undercutting the tier-1 guys by selling untested and unmarked parts.' What's the solution here? Or is there an actual solution to what amounts to pirate companies issuing counterfeit parts?" (IT Manager's Journal, like Slashdot, is part of OSTG.)
Here is the obligitory Memtest86 post. It's a great program, and chances are that you might already have a copy on your Linux install CD depending on the distro. There are even kernel patches that allow you to avoid the bad bits if they are isolated enough.
I don't follow this analogy...
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
We've been burned several times recently buying lower tier RAM. Out of a lot of 20 pieces, nearly a third was DOA or died horrible with a month of installation (and yes, I know how to install RAM).
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
I definitely prefer to go to shop, get the die, plug it in, run a test program for a few hours and have it replaced if I find any errors, than to pay some 80% extra for a sticker saying that some malaysian kid did it for me.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
These days I don't reccomend anyone to buy cheap no-name unbranded RAM. Of all the PC hardware problems I've had over the years, about 80% are down to bad faulty generic RAM. I know only use Crucial or Kingston. They check the RAM, I know the RAM I buy is going to be working. RAM is one of the most important parts of any computer system. Is it really worth saving the £3-£5 by getting cheap unbranded RAM? As the saying goes, you get what you paid for.
My other sig is crap too
I've heard of a company in the northwestern US which has gotten away with selling untested operating systems for years.
- Did I make first post?
Yandelvayasna grldenwi stravenka
Quality really seems to be a thing of the past. Cheaper != Better.
I've run into my share of bad memory in the past. That's why all new memory I get runs through extensive run through memtest86 http://www.memtest86.com/ before moving to a production system.
However, it will be interesting to see where this memory ends up in other applications that could cause a whole lot more problems than my pr0n server rebooting at random..
Solution:
Duh. I once received a SIMM where one of the chips was mis-placed on the PCB - the last two legs were actually hanging off the end into space.
Whenever there is competition there will be cost-cutting. The heavier the competition, the heavier the cost-cutting.
Command attempted to use minibuffer while in minibuffer
...as it seems products are rushed to market without significant testing. Take the Treo 650. They "tested" the device, but later found out (after release) that people who used it in the real world couldn't use the new file system because it didn't store things the same way.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
lose sales (and their reputations) because of this, the problem will die out.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
It is not only "Asian" think lot of major cos. will buy it. Thay are equaly responsible, what thay are pushing to the end user.
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/
First off, the difference isn't 80%.
Secondly, how much is your time really worth?
For me, (and I live within 5 miles of multiple PC stores), buying RAM, taking it home, installing it, finding it to be bad (After running a 45 minute or longer Memtest86) and then returning it to the store would more then cost me more then my average hourly rate at the office.
I would rather pay the few extra dollars, get home and have an extremely low chance of installing bad RAM into my PC, then have the possibility of spending the whole day driving back and forth to the PC store to eventually find a good working stick of RAM.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
The old saying stands true here... You get what you pay for. If you are going to only pay pennies on the dollar for Memory. Well you should expect a high number of failures.
If your system memory is mission critical, you probably are going to buy top-shelf rather than bargain-basement, aren't you?
Some PC manufacturers get away with selling PCs without MS Windows preinstalled.
If the product is clearly marked as untested, it's my responsiblity to test it (and replace if it's faulty). I pay less, I take more work on myself. It's my choice. Or I risk using a faulty device, but that's my choice again.
Of course this cuts into market share of the "quality brand manufacturers", and they aren't happy about that, but that's a perfectly honest competition.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Unless these companies are specifically targeting anybody willing to do the testing themselves & go through any replacement hassle I don't see what they're aiming at... that nobody will notice?
How many end users would be remotely interested in doing this stuff? And they say they're going to increase this practise and that others might do the same?
I would imagine factory testing isn't just to check the chips themselves but also to check up on the manufacturing process itself, how low quality are they aiming at? If they're hell bent on producing worthless trinkets they might as well make glass beads.
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
UTT stands for Ultra-Turbo-Technology. It's an advanced memory system created by everyone's favorite company, Rambus.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I believe we're slowly becoming a nation (world?) completely driven by prices at the expense of quality. I continuous hear things like "Why did he buy a Lexus for $50,000 when a new Hyundai is $15,000?" "This CD-R is $.10 each, this one is $.09. Why would anyone buy the $0.10 one?" People don't always get there's more to a product's specs than the price.
Really, it's easy. If they're selling untested, unmarked parts and this is a problem, just don't buy untested, unmarked parts! Let the market sort itself out. If the market decides that the cost saving here isn't worth it, the demand for slightly cheaper untested parts will surely dry up, and the manufacturers will catch on and stop trying to sell them.
If there are enough people out there though who DO want the cost saving brought on by buying untested crap - let them! Nobody says you have to buy cheap crap if it's on the shelf. You get what you pay for. You want good quality - pay good money. You want bad quality - pay peanuts.
Basic Economics, really. And it's not as if the likes of Crucial, Corsair, Kingston etc. are doing it.
Why is this even an issue? I think it's commonly accepted wisdom EVERYWHERE that going for the lowest bidder will give you cheap rubbish. Computer components are no different.
What's the big deal? A lot of products on the market are sold as untested. Out of a batch of 1000 products, only a small number might actually be tested. I know it's different with electronics, but I wouldn't have any problem buying something that I am fully aware is untested if it's cheaper.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
This isn't necessarily a problem. If the yields on the DRAM chips are high enough, then it can make sense to NOT test the individual chips and instead wait to do the testing at the module (DIMM) level. If the chip yields are perhaps 95%, then the chance that a DIMM will be good is 0.95^8, or 66%. That may be high enough to make it worth while to avoid the cost of the chip testing.
Now, if the chips are not tested AND the DIMMs are not tested, well that's another story...
I don't like the hassle when something's broken after a few months. In practice you need a long breath to obtain the rights of the warranty -- in the same period prices have dropped anyhow.
Just say no to consumerism, buy durable quality.
That is after all one of the assumptions of free market economics. Where the decision to purchase is made by informed, competent staff, that is true. Where it is made on a pure cost option with specs that this RAM does meet (ie don't specify testing), they won't lose sales.
And sadly that is how most purchasing departments work.
RAM is cheap enough as it is. My server's network card cost more than the extra 128mb of I added.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
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Electrical test of IC's and usability testing on a consumer electronics devices are COMPLETELY unrelated
Usability testing is something done very rarely (probably only a handful of times) during the development of the product, basically getting people to use the device and give some feedback
Electrical test is something done to EVERY die (usually multiple times per die) that gets shipped out of a wafer fab, is usually quite thorough, and is done by machines costing anywhere from $100k on up
Eliminating test (or even going to only testing on a sample basis) would allow a very large cut in the manufacturing costs of IC's, considering you could also eliminate burnin, and a significant chunk of your equipment overhead - DRAM chips are simple enough you could probably do it - it'd probably even be possible to have the savings from eliminating test be greater than the expense of the returns
You must be confusing the real legal system with Hollywood.
Laws are for people with no friends.
seems like untested ram would be the perfect compliment to the worthless hd that comes in dells.
We live in an era where somepeople consider £30 ($60) CD drives "disposable". The least of our worries is testing something. Because hey to these people whats the difference between 6 months and 12 years? After all it's just "throw away".
I like muppets.
In other news, slashdot reader uncovers missing step 3 in "PROFIT!!!" schemes... It is obviously to sue someone. I guess SCO and Microsoft were right all along.
Cheap ram is great. Run it through memtest. If it passes, it's just as good as the expensive stuff. If it doesn't, then return it, because it's defective. The savings in my experience are more than $10, and all of my systems with "cheap" ram work great.
In 2001? a friend of mine got a great deal at fry's on 1gb DIMMs. This is when memory was PRICY. A weekend of testing found the good ones, the rest went back.
I've had very good luck with cheaper memory. The only time I've been a memory snob is when I bought memory for my powerbook, and that was more for lack of choice than anything else.
..don't panic
3.5" disk drives, CD drives, mice and keyboards and are pretty much disposable.
(Posting AC to avoid getting moderated down by the rabid leftwing treehuggers)
Also consider Memtest86+. Supposedly, it is kept more up to date. I know that Corsair Memory recommends it over Memtest86.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
But then I pay more for organic food, I build PCs with good quality parts and pay more for an elegant case rather than one that looks like a chav car.... and would prefer a government that plans for the long term.
Ooooh look at me I'm in the minority.
The article states that the manufactorers are finding it cheaper to have customers test the RAM, and return it. This has been the case for a number of products for a number of years. Anyone remember Motorola pagers (the POCSAG and FLEX ones)? They sold millions without testing them. It was cheaper for MOT to sell them without testing them, and just accept a number of returns.
Another issue here is the use of RAM in a video card, for instance, or a router. ATI licenses its chipsets to 1-2 dozen video card manufacturers. Some are very high-end, i.e. Asus, whereas others, such as Saphire, are not. I think the memory could make a tremendous difference here, and it is something MEMTEST86 will not be able to test (that I know of). The same thing applies to routers - I am sure such cheap memory would never even be considered at Cisco, but some of the cheaper routers at CompUSA and MicroCenter for Joe Blow the end-user may be a different story. Yes, I know, you get what you pay for (usually?)
If the memory is truly untested and it is being sold as being untested: fine. What I would be afraid of with these parts is that they have been tested and that they have failed some tests. The failures may not have been total, just enough to not cause them to not be sold as prime parts. Even though I would't mind saving money by buying factory "seconds" underwear, somehow I don't think it worthwhile to save money buying factory "seconds" memory.
What I wanna know is: is someone paying that analyst? Isn't it obvious that this _could_ be a PR smear campaign? She's heard "rumours", but she doesn't cite one hard _fact_, it's all speculation...or a smear campaign (most likely).
C'mon guys, grow up. Stop being gullible.
Hum... I don't think you got that story right.
Allow me to clear it up:
Palmone decided to remedy a very common "problem" (or "inconvenience") often found it Palm or PPC devices: Hard Reset and you lose your data.
The fix? NVFS. Here's the catch: the Treo 650 has the exact same amont of memory that the Treo 600 did. Where's the catch you ask? A NVFS takes up to 33% more room to store the same amount of data as in volatile memory.
The result? A lot of people who had their Treo 600 packed (or nearly packed) got errors while synching with the 650. Not enough memory.
It is not for lack of testing, or for faulty memory, or any other defect on the model. It is a small portion of customers who are not happy with Palmone's "solution" to possible data loss.
To counter these complaints, Palmone is offering a free 128 Mb SD card to any Treo 650 owner who asks for it. Voilà.
Whenever we buy new RAM, mostly as part of new PCs, we run Memtest86. It's easy to do, it takes a while so do it overnight. There's so much that can go wrong with RAM, even with "good" RAM: it might not work together with the board, the SPD-timings might be off, whatever. Every once in a while we find some RAM that doesn't work for us and return it to the shop. We never had any problems at all to get it exchanged.
For hardware-sellers it's probably more expensive if they have to factor in a certain return-rate (and the overhead for that) so they will look to it that the RAM they buy is ok. That way market forces will work for the benefits of all of us: untested RAM will, in the end, be more expensive than tested RAM. It's much easier and cheaper to do RAMtesting factoryside than having it returned by millions of customers.
Of course that doesn't work if you buy your PC in a supermarket, but even for cheap PCs it's better to configure them yourself than buying crap. That way you can specify exactly where to save money and if anything breaks you get it fixed much quicker.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
The invisible hand will "correct" for this. If places like Frys, BestBuy, etc. buy this untested RAM and get a lot of returns, that costs them money and you can bet that next time around they won't buy from these manufacturers. When that happens enough times, these guys will either start testing RAM or go out of business.
It's a pain for the consumer (to return bad RAM... I've had to do this often enough that I stopped buying RAM from Frys) but the problem will eventually be solved by "evolution" -- companies selling product that can't compete change or die.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Just FYI, _all_ "Made By ATI" video cards are actually made by Sapphire. So you're saying... what? That ATI's own preferred manufacturer is not high end enough for you? :)
Have you actually checked that Sapphire uses worse RAM than ASUS? No offense, but somehow I doubt that.
Basically there's a helluva lot of difference between actually having a clue, and just being a slave to brand names.
Sometimes big brand names are actually _worse_ than some of the lower end competitors. (E.g., for the longest time Sony had a tradition of picking the cheapest TFT panels made by others, claiming it has _half_ the latency value that the panel's manufacturer claimed, and selling that shit for twice the price of better products.) In a lot of the big name cases you don't pay extra for quality, you just pay for having the brand name slapped on a piece of shit.
Sometimes the big name stuff is the exact same stuff that the smaller manufacturers sell. E.g., ATI cards are made by Sapphire. E.g., IBM monitors (or at least a lot of them) are made by BenQ. Yes, the el-cheapo monitor company. Etc.
So, you know, just buying the most expensive version isn't always the solution. In fact, it's usually a very bad solution.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
These arts are sold by the manufacturer at all QC levels. Some companies run their own QC and then label the parts.
It seems that the author of the referenced article is up in arms because some companies are buying parts meeting one spec and labeling them, sometimes with a third companies name, and reselling them with a BOGUS spec.
This is not the manufacturers problem!
The only people who get hurt by this are the folks who buy from the lowest priced vendor/broker/dealer, without any consideration as to where the parts came from. These folks don't even care if the parts are stolen.
As for running QC on assemblies and reworking parts, statistical QC has been around since the wheel. It's a valid approach to manufacturing. Historically those manufacturers who have handed this QC ff to the end user, without revealing the fact, have failed in business.
If you've been buying hard disk drives over the past 20 years, you know that there are always vendors who sell, "OEM" parts that do not have a manufacturers warranty. Those who use the enduser as their only QC either make it clear, keep changing names, or go out of business. Blaming ones decision to do business with these folks on the manufacturers is BULLSIT. It's a clqassic case of trying to get something for nothing by playing victim.
Not really. Untested does not mean conterfeit. It just means less quality control. If your facility makes 1000 units an hour, and it takes 30 minutes to test each unit, this means you will need 500 test fixtures and additional labor. If when tested, only 2 units out of 1000 fail, you have to ask yourself... is it really worth it to test? Sure, those 2 bad units are going to piss off a couple customers, but 99.8% customer satisfaction is completely acceptable in any market. Given the time required to test a large memory module thoroughly, I can see where testing 1000 DIMMs could cost more than pissing off 0.2% of your customer base.
Memory is like any other product... there are good manufacturers and bad manufacturers, each have their own quality level, and you can still get a good unit from a shady maker or a lemon from a trusted source. All you can do is decide how much more you're willling to pay for a higher chance that the product will satisfy you. If you don't want much risk, don't buy on the cheap from a no-name. And don't go blaming the no-name brands for low quality... they aren't deceiving anyone, you get what you pay for, and there is a market for cheap and iffy; they're just giving some of us what we want.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I wonder how long until some enterprising RAM vendor partners with Microsoft and markets "Beta" RAM. Stable enough for your enterprise's production environment, yet rushed to market so fast that they couldn't waste time with such petty concerns as "testing". Wheee!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Your disposable CD drives cost more than I paid last year for my (fast) DVD burner. They're more like 15$ here, so yes, truly disposable.
Call me a geek, but this is the scariest thing I've read all day! Sooner or later these cheap untested and mismarked components are going to make it into crucial safety or health systems and a lot of people are going to die who didn't have to.
This is just another example of sacrificing quality and ultimately safety in the name of a few more dollars (or a lot more dollars if you're really dirty and unethical). Over the last few years, I've been paying more for strong brands I can trust, but with so much counterfeiting going on now and the ensuing price pressure driven corner cutting, I wonder how long top tier brands will retain the quality that many of us now depend on?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
How is this a Managers Journal topic? This is an anandtech/toms-hardware topic. My manager has no idea what type of ram is in our machines. Heck *I* have no idea what type of ram is in our machines. Its whatever Dell/IBM/Sun provided.
They sent us ram wich didnt work too well, it was for revision 1 of our motherboard and we had revision 2. I called them up and told them that memtest86 said their ram was bad. They didn't treat me like a moron: reseat the ram, we dont support linux, etc. The guy asked me the model number for my motherboard. He said that there were two different revisions and that the ram sent to me was for the other revision. They overnighted the correct ram and paid for return shipping. I understand things like this happen and they delt with it quickly and effectively. It may be more expensive, but it's worth it to me.
-- john
This is the tip of an ice berg
Ive known some board/system makers to real really cut corners, shaving 70cents there, 40cents there in transistors or voltage regulators that should be in X spec, but are replaced by Y spec cheap shits which have much lower tollerences and higher failure rates. Just to save a few dollars here and there to rip of customers (ie business customers)
If in 1940 they lived in tin raket old sheds or bamboo houses, do you really think they have hardcore german attitude to make goods that last 100 years? When they barely live 40.
Just hope that 747 isnt using any of that ram in its guidance systems.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I see two good strategies. Personally, I will continue buying from crucial.com. By buying straight from a first-tier manufacturer, I'm guaranteed I'm not getting pirated modules. I think the other manufacturers ought to either start selling direct, or at least marking "authorized" channels.
As for Dell, they're almost certainly better off buying untested modules, and testing themselves. Every computer that's sold goes through (or should go through) a burn-in test. Adding a memory test to that step adds almost nothing to the cost. Doing the memory test in the fab, or after packaging, adds an extra manufacuring step, and is fairly expensive. The trick would be to continue to buy modules from Crucial, but work with Crucial such that (a) Crucial supplies untested modules and (b) such that Dell can do Crucial's tests in-house during system burn-in (as opposed to its own different tests). The total cost would go down.
This ought to be applicable to many non-memory parts as well. Testing is expensive. If you can do it all in one step, in software, at the end, it's a lot cheaper. In some cases (but probably not for RAM), this may involve modifying chip packaging, since some in-fab testing is done by dropping an actual probe onto contacts on the raw die that may normally not be available after chip packaging. Dell is big enough that it can push that through
If you want it to work right, buy parts from a tier-1 vendor from a reputable reseller. Buying brand-x crap might be cheaper today, but it's more expensive in the long run as you'll have to replace it sooner, and waste more of your time tracking down wierd errors caused by flakey hardware.
I hope the lesson wasn't too expensive for you. Next time, shell out a few extra bucks and get Crucial or Kingston RAM.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Buy your parts from brands you know you can trust?
I bought white-box memory *once*. Never again. It ran okay on day 1 but died in a few months.
The greedy assholes running the PC industry should be shot. They are the ones that said that end-users didn't need parity memory anymore because RAM quality was so good. They say end-users don't need ECC. All along, they've been more concerned about their profit margins than the reliability of their products. They aren't the ones who get stuck with a flakey computer that crashes every day, or silently corrupts the user's data, with no indication of the true cause of the problem. They just pocket the money and pass the costs to the end-user. If untested DRAM floods the market, the problem will just get worse.
The cost of ECC memory is trivial in comparison to the time and cost involved in dealing with the consequences of flakey memory.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Of course, if this is for your games machine or something you upgrade every few months anyway, doesn't matter. But if you think that memory might stick around for a while and get used in a business critical application...well, I wouldn't, that's all.
And yes, I do buy Crucial memory. Given my dislike of rebuilding things late into the night or being stuck without working hardware, it is extremely cheap insurance.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
It sounds like you are also (former?) Abit Customer? Granted that Abit wasn't the only manufacturer plagued with the dreaded capacitor fluid fiasco, but they certainly seemed to have the motherboard market cornered with board failures for a while.
Perhaps those problems were not directly Abit's fault, howerver, dealing with the multitude of problems from that even left a very sour taste in my mouth. Abit still generally makes decent spec. products....but I'm no longer interested in giving any business to them since that period!
I don't know, maybe Memtest86 would have shown errors if I ran it for a longer time but Prime95 certainly showed them more quickly. I recommend trying both Memtest86 and Prime95.
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When I go to places like pricewatch.com and most of the stores there are operated by Asian speaking folks and they all seem to have "for an extra four dollars we will test your memory." I always thought it was a hoax, now I realize they are buying from really really shoddy companies. Shame.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
...is to not buy cheap-ass no-name RAM. Spend the extra 30 bucks and get some damn Crucial or Mushkin, ffs.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Here's another one:
-1 Anal Retentive Asshat
If you want the corner grocery to stay in business it might be in your best interests to shop there.
Buying strawberries from the tailgate of some mangy looking dude because it's $1 a flat
cheaper isn't a good value decision.
Price isn't everything. Quality counts from a reliable vendor where you get what you pay for.
Walmart is slowly finding this out. Customers will stop shopping there after enough screw-over stories get out.
Like the Better Business Bureau advises: "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
People, while the memtest programs are nice, they suck at telling you if you have bad ram. Take your RAM to a local mom-pop shop or best buy for that matter. They have REAL ram testers that will let you know if your RAM has drift problems, soft errors, and other defects. Their tests will take ~ 15 minutes per piece of RAM. These systems are MUCH better than any program you could run.
Actually that's a fallacy. There's a long established principle in economics that whenever the cost of discernment reaches a critical level the cheap crappy look-alike beats the high quality product. This becomes a run-away situation as the economies of scale kick in as well, making the price differnetial larger and the market flooded with more lousy product increasing the consumers cost of discenrment.
This of course does not hold for all product, nor all cases since strategic marketing is indeed how one overcomes this and instills the need for quality or features on a consumer.
By the way, go stick your signature.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I can buy a Samsung DVD-RW for £35, so if the GP paid £30 for a CD drive someone really saw him coming. Just looked up the price of a Samsung CD drive at my favourite supplier... £8-£9 depending on beige/black colour.
This is being done mostly by Taiwanese DRAM makers, who are undercutting the tier-1 guys by selling untested and unmarked parts.' What's the solution here?
Ummmmm, don't buy cheap shit RAM from shady suppliers?
The major risk as I see it is a batch of modules gets into a major user (think IBM, H-P, and/or Dell) and fails (probably in Asia). The user goes publicly ballistic over the combination of faulty material and the supplier's inability to control the quality of its material. The press runs with it and the unlucky DRAM supplier's stock gets hammered. Some time afterward, it emerges that all the DRAM suppliers have this risk and then they all go down.
,HP or dell for not testing these products before shipping , i very much doubt that IBM would fail to run a memory test before shipping a server though.
If this hapens then its the fault of the companys such as IBM
It's virtually impossible for UTT memory to get into the supply chain of the tier one computer manufacturers because they deal directly with the tier one memory manufacturers (think Samsung and Micron). The modules that they purchase from those manufacturers are designed specifically for that company and designed for a specific memory chip. The modules must meet specifications provided by the customer before they'll buy any of them - and those specs include testing.
The tier one computer manufacturers don't go out shopping for memory and just buy a bunch of modules. They're all very specific about what memory modules they purchase and work very closely with the memory manufacturers to make sure that the memory that they need is what they get. Becaues of that, they don't have to run memory tests on the memory that they buy - it's been done at the memory manufacturer and the computer manufacturers have a very, very close working relationship with them.
I know because I'm an engineer at one of the tier one memory manufacturers and I design memory modules. The risk of UTT memory showing up in an IBM, Dell or other tier one system is zero.
Tell that to the droves of people that shop at Wal-Mart. Some of the stuff sold there (specifically in the electronics department) is absolute trash, but people buy it anyway because it's cheap.
that seems to be all anyone cares about - cheap. *sigh*
I found a bunch of untested RAM in my back yard. It may look suspiciosly like gravel, but until you actually test it, nobody's proven that it won't work just fine as system memory. I'm willing to sell it cheap; let me know if your interested.
ever heard of professional poker players?
copyright © 2005 Flamsmsmark the ravings of a melancholly i
You just have a choice now. You can choose to buy cheap goods that have little to no warntee and are likely to fail soon or you can choose to pay more and get quality stuff. I mean right now if I check on Pricewatch, the cheapest price for a 512MB stick of PC3200 RAM is $28 shipped. It is, of course, generic RAM and seems to lack any warentee.
If I head over to crucial.com (Micron's direct brand name) I find the same things runs $60 shipped. However the Micron RAM is fully tested and warenteed for a lifetime (and they really aren't kidding about that). If you use their memory selector that chooses the right RAM for your motherboard/system, they gaurentee compatiblity and will replace your RAM at no charge if it turns out to be incompatible.
Quality isn't a thing of the past, it's just that manufacturing has been streamlined to the point, and corners cut to the point, that many things can be produced quite cheaply, so long as quality isn't a major concern. However you can't expect to pay the cheapest prices and ALSO get high quality, that's what the problem seems to be. People whine how things "aren't built like they used to be". I then point out something that is as or more quality than the older stuff, and similarly priced. They then bitch about the price.
So it's not that you can't have quality, and it's not that you can't have a rock bottom price, you just can't have both in the same package. You either choose to pay for quality, or you choose to save money and deal with the lower quality.
The solution is that the chips should be sold "as is, untested" for the lower cost. Buyer beware and all that. You get to do the testing in exchange for a lower price.
Otherwise it sounds like fraud and should be prosecuted as such.
Of course, in the back of my mind I know that the race to the bottom hasn't affected actual physical goods as much as it's affected software. Still, I expect to get cheap crap regardless of what I buy, so I buy cheap :-)
Oh yeah! Companies using Beta RAM and Linux could just as well switch back to Windows then. Microsoft would be delighted in a "I told you so" kind of way. They sure would gain from such a deal.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
(And money is cheap!)
Almost sounds like it should be a Yogi Berra-ism.
I'm really amazed that any company tests every stick of ram. It would seem much smarter to use statistical checking like they do in other mass production markets. Ok so maybe a few bad sticks will get through, but lots get through anyway. Even with big name brands like Kingston.
I'll take the 1% savings for a 10 minute waste of time every 6 months. I'll end up way ahead that way. Good for these guys.
For the last few years the only place I have bought ram from was mailorder from Crucial's website. /.).
There are a few other ram maker's that I would also buy direct from their websites, but Crucial has often had the best price (and they make GOOD ram).
CompUSA, OfficeDepot and OfficMax stand behind everything they sell so if you must buy from a local store (need it NOW) they are also safe. I'd keep away from BestBuy though. I've heard too many horror stories about them (some on
If we did a RMA-retail-style model with our customers they'd leave us in a heartbeat.
While this model works for us on the wholesale end I don't see it in use anywhere on the retail, mail order side. We use to do a little retail but dumped it because it just wasn't worth it.
BTW, the memory game is tough. We check our supply prices and currency exchange rates a few times a day. With such thin margins one mistake can easily cost you a week's worth of profit. Between a very low defect rate of memory sticks and razor thin profit margins no one in the business would be a bit surprised that some manufacturers skip testing.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Are there any products on the market that can identify a DRAM vendor by using the data scramble patterns? Such a tool might be useful to flush out crappy DRAM.
DRAM is just a bunch of capacitors on a chip. When the chip is powered down for a while, the voltage on the caps leaks towards ground. When the DRAM is powered up, all caps are at ground. Discharge to this state can be accelerated by exposing the die to light.
Here's where it gets interesting: just because a cap is at ground on the die does not mean that you will read a zero out of the chip. With modern folded bitline architectures, half of the cells will read out as zero, and the other half as one. The pattern of 1/0 forms a definite pattern, called the "data scramble" which is a function of the chip architecture, and which will differ from vendor to vendor. Provided that few cells have been overwritten by the PC bootup, you can recover the scramble pattern and possibly identify the vendor.
Remember your old Commodore 64? Power it up, cold, and POKE 53265,59. That will slam the video chip into graphics mode. See the pattern? It's not random. That's the data scramble.
Two DRAM chips having different data scrambles are definitely not the same design. The converse is not true: two DRAM chips having identical data scrambles might be made by the same vendor, but there is a slight chance that two different vendors just happened on the same pattern. I don't know how much variation there is in scramble patterns, but this might be a useful way to trace chips to vendors.
The more technical explanation for scramble patterns: the sense amplifiers in a DRAM chip are essentially differential. The inputs to the sense amp are two bitlines. Each bitline is connected to a different physical column in the memory array. Between cycles, the bitlines are pre-charged to VDD/2. When a row of DRAM is read, one bitline is connected to the cell capacitor and receives an offset charge while the other bitline is held at the reference. The sense amp then "pulls apart" the bitlines, driving the higher one to VDD and the lower one to ground. Depending on which bitline a zero-charged capacitor is connected to, the sense amp can swing one way or the other. The exact connection depends highly on the cell geometry and fabrication process.
Past the sense amp, more fun happens. DRAMs are so dense that the signal from the sense amp requires one or two more levels of amplification before being suitable to drive to pins. To diminish crosstalk effects, the data buses are "twisted" like twisted-pair, which creates further address-dependent inversions in the pattern.
The combination of cell geometry and data bus twist create a vendor-unique pattern. It's unlikely that two vendors with two different designs will happen on the same scramble pattern.
this. :)
From my experiance it isn't hard to find a local outfit that betters the web price.
Really unless one's buying a hundred sticks at a time, local's always best, & in regards bulk buys a official 1st teir distributor/reseller is maybe the go, but for some strange reason the local outfits are often cheaper in that dept too.
I've never met a memory seller who didn't send offor hand over a new stick straight away to replace one rejected by a customer (as long as it was within a reasonable timeframe of the original purchase).
Afterall what's it matter, if the rejected stick's OK one can simply hand it over or send it off to the next bugger that complain's his new stick doesn't work. Where as if it's a real dud one just sends it back to one's supplier for a credit. Either way it's no loss to replace the stick straight away.
Just go to a repossesion/estate auction house - they do not explicity say if any products arn't functioning as their maker intended, it's a case of buyer beware & 100% legal (that's why one can inspect the goods 1st)
If it says "untested" when you buy it, then that means you either have to test it yourself or not buy it. If you buy untested memory and then test it and find it doesn't work you should be able to get a refund because theres nothing saying "your consumer rights are null and void if this product doesn't work". If it says "tested" or doesn't say anything then you should assume its tested and if it doesn't work it should be replaced for free. Isn't this pretty standard law?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
If they are mislabeling them then yes that is very much illegal , but mostly they make no claim to this , If you want to risk buying these chips then fair enough
They are mostly not pirates though and labeling them that because they are undercutting other firms sounds like a dubious marketing ploy.If you had RTFA:This means that if you buy an IBM or Dell, the Samsung or Micron RAM in your computer is genuine, because IBM and Dell deal directly with the tier-1 manufacturers like Samsung, and these manufacturers test their chips as demanded by the clients. If you're building your own system, you're not in a position to demand testing from anybody, and all bets are off. A Samsung or Micron label on the IC effectively means nothing.
It seems lots of people can't tell the difference between capitalism and fraud- and assume that since capitalism is great, fraud must be OK too.
Every tire you've ever bought or has come with a car you drove was sold unbalanced. How is that different from people buying untested DRAMs?
Give serendipity a chance.
If that's the case, then flooding the market with cheap memory will have a cause and effect on the market and on stockholders?
I believe we're slowly becoming a nation (world?) completely driven by prices at the expense of quality. I continuous hear things like "Why did he buy a Lexus for $50,000 when a new Hyundai is $15,000?" "This CD-R is $.10 each, this one is $.09. Why would anyone buy the $0.10 one?" People don't always get there's more to a product's specs than the price.
1. Huyndai are more reliable than Lexus, in fact Huyndai was the most reliable car in the latest consumer review report.
2. Cars today are significantly more reliable than they were 20 more years ago.
A quote from consumer reviews regarding the latter claim: "One thing that has made used cars more appealing is their improved reliability. In a 20-year reliability trend compiled using 1980 to 2000 Consumer Reports annual subscriber surveys, we have found that the reliability of vehicles has vastly improved. The reported problems per hundred vehicles has declined to a fraction of what it was in 1980. Rust and exhaust-system problems, once common, are now no longer major problems.".
I simply don't understand why people are whining about a cheap-@ss untested chip. If you want reliability buy something else. If I want to save a penny and test my own chip, what gives you the urge to stop me?
Tor
Then I don't understand something about your comment. I'm willing to believe that this article is a marketing hack, but I don't understand something here:
. .
If these chips sell to people under no false pretense about what they are and there is a market for them then what exactly are they doing wrong
If they are mislabeling them then yes that is very much illegal , but mostly they make no claim to this , If you want to risk buying these chips then fair enough
They are mostly not pirates though and labeling them that because they are undercutting other firms sounds like a dubious marketing ploy.
Is it the case, or is it not, that you could go into Fry's and purchase Samsung memory that was never manufactured by Samsung? Because that's what the article implies- the manufacturer sells the chips to a reseller, at a low rate, and asks the reseller how he wants to mark the chips. Further down the chain the chips appear in Fry's or some catalog with "Samsung" labels on them. What am I missing?
A LONG time ago (IE 1994ish) I worked at a shady computer shop. We had a customer bring in a bad ram chip (I think it was a 72pin SIMM) and one of the chips was actually tilted at about a 30 degree from where it should have been. It was painfully obvious even looking at it from 4 feet away, there was absolutely no way it could have been even looked at by a human.
:) J/K
Of course we told him it was his motherboard that was giving him problems!
Another time we got a power supply that was wired wrong, when the customer plugged it in to his hard drive, it promptly caught the drive on fire.
So this has been going on for a LONG time obviously.
It's like gambling rupies in Zelda.
Mine is Good
1Winged Angel writes "Amanda Hugandkiss in IT Multiverse reports that 'In recent months, some OS makers have been getting away with selling untested ("UTT") OSs. Disturbingly, the practice seems to be getting traction at the lower portion of the OS business. This is being done mostly by Redmond-based makers, who are undercutting the tier-1 guys by selling untested and unmarked software.' What's the solution here? Or is there an actual solution to what amounts to pirate companies issuing counterfeit OSs?" (IT Multiverse , unlike Slashdot, is not part of OSTG.)
undercutting the tier-1 guys by selling untested and unmarked parts.' What's the solution here? Or is there an actual solution to what amounts to pirate companies issuing counterfeit parts?
If they were marked with a company brand name, logo, or company-specific part number but haven't gone through the company's usual testing procedures (perhaps they're floor sweepings), THEN it would be okay to call them counterfeit. A better name for these is generic.
If they're sold as something other than what they are, that's a different matter, but in that case I'd call it "mismarketing" (at best).
Reading and quoting TFA, everything is 'untested' in the first two paragraphs, but the third states:
I equate mismarking of DRAM units with counterfeiting.
So how are these mismarked? I thougnt they were UNmarked.
Okay, finally, here we are, paragraph 10 of a 15-paragraph article:
The scary aspect of this practice is that some places in Asia are apparently adding counterfeit tier-1 DRAM logos onto the ICs.
Someone tell this author how to write a FA.
Tag lost or not installed.
Back in the day when I sold computer parts we sold to all sorts of individuals.
The geeks would test the system and return anything that had a issue.
The large mass crowd would run the system and would return the entire system if their was an issue. In the case of bad RAM they would often re-install windows due the amount of time it crashes or just accept the amount of crashes as the tech would say "what do you expect from running Windows?".
From the geek crowd we knew that about 10% of the RAM had some issue from it (As 10% of the RAM was return from the Geeks was found to have issues) While 0% of RAM was returned the the mom and dads.
I would suspect that these places that sell home built systems will use the cheapest part around. The people who buy these pre-built systems are not too computer savy and will assume the crashs are the result of the bugy OS rather than possible bad parts or RAM.
Who cares, this must be ECC memory... euh wait....
-- Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world; it's the only thing that ever has.
You know Abercrombie used to be an actual outfitter before becoming the faux outfitter mall wart... I really hope the same thing doesn't happen to EMS.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
You can basically buy untested unmarked memory from any of the Tier-1 suppliers. There are lots of uses for this memory. For example low-end consumer products (alarm clocks, radios, etc), toys and more. The difference is that Tier-1 suppliers make customers sign agreements that the untested memory will not be used in computers or medical equipment. These vendors are afraid of secondary lawsuits. Some vendors even audit their customers for compliance.
The situation here is that the Asia guys are actually putting this memory in computers where the harm can be greater.
Hah, they think they're so smart selling untested chips. Little do they know, their financial system is running on my untested code . . . suckers!
Don't buy cheap ram. You almost always end up paying for it in the end, and an OS corrupted slowly over time by faulty memory is a nightmare, not to mention what it does to your data. You get what you pay for.
Your link has NOTHING to do with this story. RTFA and RTFLink.
I can believe CDRs that are 10% cheaper might be 10% less reliable. That is reasonable, and fits with experiences I have had.
But is a 70% cheaper Hyundai really 70% less car than a $50k Lexus? Not likely. Somebody who goes the Lexus route in that scenario is probably purchasing nothing but his own ego-inflation.