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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

#51

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mc32 wrote: post #39
ippisl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Dell tests nothing. Parts in one door, assembly, shipped out other door to consumer.

Essentially you the consumer are doing the burn-in. Its cheaper for Dell to replace failed machines. The cost to burn-in (and the time!) is large.

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

#52

Post by scott_s »

ippisl wrote: post #50
scott_s wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their conclusions on "white boxes" are based on relatively straightforward statistical analysis of their data. In order for there to be bias against white boxes, one of the following has to be true: 1. Their data collection methods are biased against white boxes. Given the large sample size and the method of retrieving samples - automatically generated crash reports from users - I find this unlikely. They cover this…

The problem is that they didn't wrote in their paper :"white boxes are known to have large variability in their level of reliability. We leave it to further study to compare the reliability of white boxes built with quality components to brand boxes". Do you think they haven't known that ? This kind of remarks of the incompleteness of research done is common in many research papers. And they definitely contribute to…

The problem with your statement is that it's based on anecdote. From their related work section: "The effect on failure rates of overclocking and underclocking, brand name vs. white box, and memory size have not been previously studied." You assume that white boxes have a large variability in reliability based on your personal experience and anecdote. But, according to the authors, there is no systematic study backing that up. "Quality components" is similarly difficult to pin down.

The authors stated a conclusion, but did not speculate on the cause behind the conclusion. I see no bias in them not calling attention to the fact that they have not studied the cause - that is self-evident.

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

#53

Post by osivertsson »

kahawe wrote: post #31
ippisl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

I agree with you that many factors need to be considered here that isn't mentioned in the paper. But they mention in section 5.3, "Brand name vs. white box", that "to avoid conflation with other factors, we remove overclocked machines and laptops from our analysis."

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

#54

Post by __alexs »

josephturnip wrote: post #18
hollerith wrote: post #17

The result most surprising to me is that laptops are between 25% and 60% less likely than desktop machines to crash from a hardware fault during the first 30 days worth of measurements. The much larger weight and volume of desktops would seem to make them easier to cool.

That caught my eye too.. perhaps it's because laptops are designed with being carried around in mind? Or, to draw on the other conclusions from the paper, because laptops generally have lower-frequency chips (and for that matter, slower memory and disks too)?

Interesting that they knew that CPU speed resulted in more crashes but didn't test this when it came to laptops vs desktops. If only they had released their data :(

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

#55

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

I'm having a hard time coming to terms with "Laptops less likely to crash from hardware fault than desktops"

Everything we've learned from experience, surveys, and PC World magazines has showed the opposite. Heat kills hardware and laptops have their hardware packed together so closely that it generates lots of heat. Back then I remember reading something like 1 in 4 laptops fail in the first 3 years. Which was very believable, at the time I was in collage for game design & development. All 80 guys in our class had laptops from HP (with get this... Pentium 4s in them). Those laptops had a LOT of problems. They were basically portable heaters.

So I guess laptops now have either much better cooling, much cooler CPUs or a combination. OR PCs are just terribly cooled.

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

#56

Post by Avitas »

kristaps wrote: post #6

Interesting, too bad the power supplies could not be controlled in their setup, as a wonky power supply can unleash all kinds of gremlins that look like failures in components down the line.

I have been telling my staff for probably 15 or so years that likeliest cause of PC failure is (in the following order):

- Power supply - Hard Drive

Ranking near these are sleeve bearing fans with ball bearing fans a close second--for CPU and case cooling.

In rough order, I would say that the following is my estimation of other common component failure sources:

- Removable Drives (floppy, optical, etc.) - Video Card (if separate) - Motherboard - RAM - CPU

These are for our corporate PCs which have been Compaq, Dell, IBM, HP, Lenovo and a few other brands.

For our brand name and whitebox server hardware, it's pretty much the same... if something is going to fail, it's going to be a power supply or a hard drive. In fact, I don't ever remember a single server motherboard, RAID controller, RAM stick, CPU or other component ever going bad in a server.

I wonder why they would leave out statistics relating to power supplies when they are, in my experience, the component with the greatest failure rate.

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

#57

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #55

I'm having a hard time coming to terms with "Laptops less likely to crash from hardware fault than desktops" Everything we've learned from experience, surveys, and PC World magazines has showed the opposite. Heat kills hardware and laptops have their hardware packed together so closely that it generates lots of heat. Back then I remember reading something like 1 in 4 laptops fail in the first 3 years. Which was very…

Just a theory, but perhaps laptops have a shorter lifespan in general?

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

#58

Post by mertd »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #55

I'm having a hard time coming to terms with "Laptops less likely to crash from hardware fault than desktops" Everything we've learned from experience, surveys, and PC World magazines has showed the opposite. Heat kills hardware and laptops have their hardware packed together so closely that it generates lots of heat. Back then I remember reading something like 1 in 4 laptops fail in the first 3 years. Which was very…

Here is the authors' hypothesis:

We hypothesize that the durability features built into laptops (such as motion-robust hard drives) make these machines more robust to failures in general. Perhaps the physical environment of a home or of- fice is not much gentler to a computer as the difference in engineering warrants.

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

#59

Post by chaud »

dripton wrote: post #13
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…

Funny, I suspect that SSDs have much higher real-world failure rates. (My personal, limited, anecdotal evidence is that my 64 GB Crucial M4 SSD lasted about a year as the root drive in a busy Linux desktop, while I have a stack of about a dozen hard drives that have been retired due to being too small or too slow while still working fine.) Lack of moving parts is great, but flash allows a finite number of write cycle…

How heavily were you using the laptop? Did it fail from running out of write cycles or something else?

Some people over on xtremesystems have done Endurance testing, and the 64 GB m4 took over 700TB of writing to for failure to occur, and 172 TB to reduce the MWI to 0.

In a little over a year I have only written 4.1TB to my SSD in my desktop. Write cycles are very unlikely to run out for me before I replace the drive.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SS...

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

#60

Post by scott_s »

andreasvc wrote: post #49
latch wrote: post #3

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

Mathematical formulas are a big reason; wikipedia uses images which look passable unless you start zooming in. Another reason is that with HTML you're never sure if you'll end up with the fonts as they were intended. Lastly, because HTML is not a page-oriented markup format, the presentation in general can differ from system to system; e.g., you can't say "on line 2 of page 3".

You may not have seen MathJax: http://www.mathjax.org/ The main drawback is that I noticed a delay before it fills in the correct math notation. But the results are quite impressive.
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