[Tfug] Hardware reliability

[Zack Williams]

> Have other folks had similar experiences?  Have I just been
> "lucky"?

I don't think I'd call you lucky - just that you've picked good
quality components over the years. In my work I see a lot of machines.
 The failures come down to basically 3 things:

1. Manufacturing defects (bad capacitors mainly)

2. Dead components with moving parts (fans, power supplies, hard
disks, optical drives)

3. Physical abuse.  (mainly laptops that take a beating)

While you can generally prevent #3, #1 is really hard to identify
other than retroactively as a group and #2 is pretty much random.

Some models are known to be worse than others - for example, certain
Dell towers and iMac G5's I automatically pop open at the first sign
of trouble because they're know to have bad caps.

Some hardware is pretty much bulletproof.  That 5+ year uptime OpenBSD
machine I posted about is running a P2-350 (slot-1, no fan on the
heatsink) on a 440 BX motherboard with Crucial ECC ram.    As long as
the power supply and hard disk hold out it will likely keep going
because everything else is passive on the system,

- Zack