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An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

research.microsoft.com

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Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

#31

Post by kahawe »

ippisl wrote: post #21
wazoox wrote: post #11

Among other interesting insights: * a machine that crashed once is 100 times more likely to crash again; the more it crashes, the more it's prone to fail again. * overclocking significantly reduces reliability. One CPU vendor (AMD or Intel, but unspecified) is much worse in this regard, too. * conversely, underclocking improves reliability. * branded computers are more reliable than beige boxes. * laptops are more re…

>> branded computers are more reliable than beige boxes. This is meaningless. The real question is how those compare to beige box that uses a decent parts. But Microsoft definitely has interest in helping manufacturers of brand computers because piracy is more prevalent in beige boxes.

Taking a stab in the dark here but I am wondering how important users messing with their boxes are there.

I assume more "beige boxes" are either bought together from cheap components and been assembled by the users themselves or are generally cheap noname buys assembled by who-knows in the shop or maybe they have been modified and/or over-clocked by enthusiasts thus making it more likely to fail - whereas the typical users who buy "brand name" PCs or laptops are not going to mess with them and they can rely on at least SOME standardized quality assurance and control.

Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

#32

Post by scott_s »

mbafk wrote: post #29
scott_s wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As mbafk and josephturnip state, they simply put online the same copy that was published in the conference. Academic conferences typically publish papers in PDF form. But, that doesn't actually answer your question, which I think is "Barely." I feel silly preparing PDFs for publication when I know that most people will read it on their computer, not print it out. Many conferences no longer even have an actual, physic…

I agree it would be great if there was a good HTML template the IEEE or ACM used. Even using Latex you spend ages making it look exactly the way you want and don't want to upload a dodgy HTML version.

The major difficulty, I think, are figures. How can we maintain keeping figures near the text that talks about them, and also allows a high density of them? The best I can come up with is a narrow column of text on the left (similar in size to a column of text in an ACM or IEEE double column format), and a larger column on the right with figures. The difficulty is in anchoring the figures in the right column with the text. But then you may have a bunch of figures piled up in one place, and a sensible layout becomes difficult to do.

Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

#33

Post by cs702 »

wazoox wrote: post #27
cs702 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wazoox: thanks. Do you recall the source(s) for those numbers?

So far, the best source I can recall is this study: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-...

wazoox: thanks for that. Just read it.

My take: so far, no one has sufficient consistent-across-the-board data at the moment to reach a conclusion about the matter, but the anecdotal evidence presented in that article suggests that Intel SSDs probably have lower failure rates than most traditional and solid-state alternatives. I will keep that in mind next time I buy an SSD.

Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

#34

Post by cs702 »

thechut wrote: post #24
cs702 wrote: post #10

Very useful -- I will take this analysis into account when it's time to upgrade my current personal machine or configure the next one! Thank you for posting this here. The only thing I would have wanted to see but didn't in this analysis is how failure rates vary for different types of disk subsystem -- specifically, traditional hard drives versus the newer solid-state devices. I suspect, but don't know for sure, tha…

cs702, this is the article I looked at before buying my SSD recently: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-... It's talking specifically about disk failures though, not comparing whole systems

thechut: thanks. See my response here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4162362

Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

#35

Post by acqq »

zipdog wrote: post #19
acqq wrote: post #7

There are a lot of insights in the paper, but I'd really like to know about this: "The table shows that CPUs from Vendor A are nearly 20x as likely to crash a machine during the 8 month observation period when they are overclocked, and CPUs from Vendor B are over 4x as likely" Obviously it's 5 times difference in probability to have unstable system if overclocked between Intel and AMD but they don't say which one is…

When Google did a massive analysis of hard-drive failures they also didn't publish manufacturer names, because they felt that it would tarnish the company name when it might just be a production run

Yes, such statistics would have to be limited to the exact models analyzed, I can imagine the results in the next generation of the products turning other way around.

Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

#36

Post by Dn_Ab »

scott_s wrote: post #26
latch wrote: post #3

Is there a compelling reason for this to be a PDF rather than HTML? I'm genuinely curious.

As mbafk and josephturnip state, they simply put online the same copy that was published in the conference. Academic conferences typically publish papers in PDF form. But, that doesn't actually answer your question, which I think is "Barely." I feel silly preparing PDFs for publication when I know that most people will read it on their computer, not print it out. Many conferences no longer even have an actual, physic…

I am outside academia but I read a lot of papers. For most people outside I suspect the biggest problem is paywalls and not format. If you don't read a paper because it is a PDF and not HTML then you weren't really interested. With chrome, it is not even an annoyance as when you had to load adobe.

One reason for PDFs is as you mentioned, latex to HTML results are typically poor. Diagrams are another difficulty that don't have an easy HTML solution. Other reasons I prefer PDFs are: though I never print, I often save papers to disk since I don't always find the paper when I go searching the second time (especially if it is months or even years after), there is a real benefit to being able to read a paper offline - I don't always have a connection to the net when I want to read and lastly, if you have an ereader such as the kindle, pdfs render well on them.

Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

#37

Post by starpilot »

zipdog wrote: post #19
acqq wrote: post #7

There are a lot of insights in the paper, but I'd really like to know about this: "The table shows that CPUs from Vendor A are nearly 20x as likely to crash a machine during the 8 month observation period when they are overclocked, and CPUs from Vendor B are over 4x as likely" Obviously it's 5 times difference in probability to have unstable system if overclocked between Intel and AMD but they don't say which one is…

When Google did a massive analysis of hard-drive failures they also didn't publish manufacturer names, because they felt that it would tarnish the company name when it might just be a production run

Actually, they were just keeping their cards close to their chest:

> However, in this paper, we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data.

http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

#38

Post by AngryParsley »

wazoox wrote: post #27
cs702 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wazoox: thanks. Do you recall the source(s) for those numbers?

So far, the best source I can recall is this study: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-...

That study is Intel-only, but it seems to jive with the return rates Anandtech mentioned: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review/...

There are also numbers for hard drives: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2147063

Basically, Intel SSDs from a year ago are more reliable than all hard drives. And SSDs in general are more reliable than any 2TB hard drive.

The data isn't ideal, but it's better than anecdotes. Return rates should correlate pretty well with failure rates. If anything, return rates should favor hard drives, since people are less likely to return a faulty cheap hard drive than a faulty expensive SSD.

Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

#39

Post by mc32 »

ippisl wrote: post #21
wazoox wrote: post #11

Among other interesting insights: * a machine that crashed once is 100 times more likely to crash again; the more it crashes, the more it's prone to fail again. * overclocking significantly reduces reliability. One CPU vendor (AMD or Intel, but unspecified) is much worse in this regard, too. * conversely, underclocking improves reliability. * branded computers are more reliable than beige boxes. * laptops are more re…

>> branded computers are more reliable than beige boxes. This is meaningless. The real question is how those compare to beige box that uses a decent parts. But Microsoft definitely has interest in helping manufacturers of brand computers because piracy is more prevalent in beige boxes.

Perhaps the difference is in testing.

A large mfg, I would imagine, would test a configuration repeatedly before making it available, and then, once approved, the individual systems would go through burn-in, probably with more rigor than beige boxes. So even beige boxes with pricier (but unproven configurations) might suffer from grater failure rates. In addition, large mfgs might be able to demand better "lots" from their parts mfgs/oems.

Just a thought.

Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

#40

Post by scott_s »

Dn_Ab wrote: post #36
scott_s wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As mbafk and josephturnip state, they simply put online the same copy that was published in the conference. Academic conferences typically publish papers in PDF form. But, that doesn't actually answer your question, which I think is "Barely." I feel silly preparing PDFs for publication when I know that most people will read it on their computer, not print it out. Many conferences no longer even have an actual, physic…

I am outside academia but I read a lot of papers. For most people outside I suspect the biggest problem is paywalls and not format. If you don't read a paper because it is a PDF and not HTML then you weren't really interested. With chrome, it is not even an annoyance as when you had to load adobe. One reason for PDFs is as you mentioned, latex to HTML results are typically poor. Diagrams are another difficulty that d…

Paywalls are probably a bigger issue, but it's still friction. Anyway, modern browsers give the option to save all of the images along with the HTML file.
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