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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.
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...
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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?
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.
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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.
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...
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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"?
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.
...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?"
No mission-critical application would ever use memory without ECC. You don't have anything to worry about.
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.
But Prime95 confirms that no bit anywhere in nearly the complete memory space ever spuriously changes. I have seen plenty of memory that passes metest86 that fails prime95.
Based on my experience, Corsair will replace memory that fails prime95. Mushkin will NOT (despite a "lifetime" warranty); they basically told me that memory can't be expected to be 100% perfect all the time and that prime95 was too strenuous; if it passes memtest86 there will be no replacement. My other modules (from Geil, Samsung, and a few old no-name sticks) have always been perfect. IMO it's unconscionable to sell untested ram given how hard it is to return.
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.