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By far the worst PC component I have come across containing LEDs is Kingston's HyperX Fury RGB SSD [1]. It's a 2.5" SSD with 75 LEDs! These LEDs generate so muc

By far the worst PC component I have come across containing LEDs is Kingston's HyperX Fury RGB SSD [1]. It's a 2.5" SSD with 75 LEDs! These LEDs generate so much heat (70°C+) that the drive thermal throttles and either prevents the operating system from booting or causes significant performance issues [2]. [1] https://www.hyperxgaming.com/us/storage/fury-rgb-ssd https://www.hyperxgaming.com/us/storage/fury-rgb-ssd [2] https://youtu.be/vnST5rA64Oc https://youtu.be/vnST5rA64Oc

userbinator 7y ago
Life expectancy 1 million hours MTBF Garish LEDs aside, marketing that sort of blatantly false exaggerated spec should be illegal. 1M hours is over 100 years.
- TylerE 7y ago
  May well not be unreasonable for a solid state component. Also, keep in mind that MTBF is not expected lifetime or anything at all like that. What a 1 million hour MTBF actually means is that if you had 1 million of these drives running at the same time, you'd expect one failure per hour. (Or similarly, if you had 1000 drives, you'd expect a failure every 1000 hours).
  - markwkw 7y ago
    Following your logic: 100 drives - failure every 10,000 hours 10 drives - failure every 100,000 hours 1 drive - failure every 1,000,000 hours... How is this not expected lifetime? [edit: split lines]
    - barrkel 7y ago
      The mean rate of failures over time may not be constant, but it may have a mode for an expected life time window. This modal mean rate of failure is what's being described, I reckon. It would be nice to know the time window, but I'd expect it to be somewhere in the 5 to 10 year range.
- wumms 7y ago
  For a 5-year life span 1M hours MTBF (114 years) mean the probability of an error for a single drive is about 4.3% (1-e^-(5/114)). That equals 0.86% Annual Failure Rate (AFR). Backblaze regularly provides their real-world-usage drive stats: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2019/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1... Seagate announced they would use AFR instead of MTBF in the future: https://www.seagate.com/de/de/support/kb/hard-disk-drive-reliability-and-mtbf-afr-174791en/ https://www.seagate.com/de/de/support/kb/hard-disk-drive-rel...
  - TylerE 7y ago
    Those rates are surprisingly low considering that's spinning iron. I'd love to see a similar data set for SSDs. Of course, it also depends on what you count as a failure. Is a drive that can no longer write but can still read a "failure"? Probably - but that's a considerably softer way to fail than a hard drive with a bad bearing or head.
    - imtringued 7y ago
      A lot of SSDs that fail early, fail because of their firmware. That MTBF probably only covers the reliability of the flash chips but not the controller.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    > 0.86% So my comment is 100% nitpick but I do want to make a point here. X year failure rate divided by X is not the same as AFR. AFR will always be higher, because it has to compensate for each year's pool of potential failures shrinking. The correct equation is already there, 1-e^-(n/114), and the correct number is .87%. And while that's only a percent off, it's lucky to only be a percent off. If MTBF was 113 years it would be .86 vs. .88, which is the difference between two digits of accuracy and one and a half digits of accuracy. Losing a quarter of your accuracy is not great!

userbinator 7y ago

Life expectancy 1 million hours MTBF Garish LEDs aside, marketing that sort of blatantly false exaggerated spec should be illegal. 1M hours is over 100 years.

TylerE 7y ago
May well not be unreasonable for a solid state component. Also, keep in mind that MTBF is not expected lifetime or anything at all like that. What a 1 million hour MTBF actually means is that if you had 1 million of these drives running at the same time, you'd expect one failure per hour. (Or similarly, if you had 1000 drives, you'd expect a failure every 1000 hours).
- markwkw 7y ago
  Following your logic: 100 drives - failure every 10,000 hours 10 drives - failure every 100,000 hours 1 drive - failure every 1,000,000 hours... How is this not expected lifetime? [edit: split lines]
  - barrkel 7y ago
    The mean rate of failures over time may not be constant, but it may have a mode for an expected life time window. This modal mean rate of failure is what's being described, I reckon. It would be nice to know the time window, but I'd expect it to be somewhere in the 5 to 10 year range.
wumms 7y ago
For a 5-year life span 1M hours MTBF (114 years) mean the probability of an error for a single drive is about 4.3% (1-e^-(5/114)). That equals 0.86% Annual Failure Rate (AFR). Backblaze regularly provides their real-world-usage drive stats: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2019/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1... Seagate announced they would use AFR instead of MTBF in the future: https://www.seagate.com/de/de/support/kb/hard-disk-drive-reliability-and-mtbf-afr-174791en/ https://www.seagate.com/de/de/support/kb/hard-disk-drive-rel...
- TylerE 7y ago
  Those rates are surprisingly low considering that's spinning iron. I'd love to see a similar data set for SSDs. Of course, it also depends on what you count as a failure. Is a drive that can no longer write but can still read a "failure"? Probably - but that's a considerably softer way to fail than a hard drive with a bad bearing or head.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    A lot of SSDs that fail early, fail because of their firmware. That MTBF probably only covers the reliability of the flash chips but not the controller.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > 0.86% So my comment is 100% nitpick but I do want to make a point here. X year failure rate divided by X is not the same as AFR. AFR will always be higher, because it has to compensate for each year's pool of potential failures shrinking. The correct equation is already there, 1-e^-(n/114), and the correct number is .87%. And while that's only a percent off, it's lucky to only be a percent off. If MTBF was 113 years it would be .86 vs. .88, which is the difference between two digits of accuracy and one and a half digits of accuracy. Losing a quarter of your accuracy is not great!