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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
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
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"
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?
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...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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
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
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
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.