Re: [linux-audio-dev] Re: [linux-audio-user] disaster day #1

Power supplies that go into an OEM product tend to get a lot of engineering resources thrown at them. But the end user has neither the time, tools, nor the experitse to deal with all that, so lots of cheap, junk power supplies get used. Plus, people generally only read the total watts, not the inidvidual currents and additive wattage of +3.3V, +5V, and +12V. Also, there are power supply vendors that use sub-spec wire and connectors. The power supply can deliver to voltage and current, but the wiring harness is not capable of delivering that to the motherboard and peripherials. They are betting that no one or a rare few will actually get near the max. requirements, so shave pennies off each supply in a mis-guided attempt to reduce costs. Not really. Most home users/workstations use 2 to 4 DIMMs at most. And even then, most of that is not active. So a transient memory error rarely has a chance to be noticed. When you expect 60% to 80% memory utilization 24x7, and the number of DIMMs increases, then the chances of hitting a memory error are more likely. Some systems in the field are running 4 TB of ram. That's a lot of DIMMs. The first few months deployed are real nightmares. It's not uncommon to see 200 DIMM failures. But all those are not always real, they may be transistive. And most error logging for memory errors is pretty poor, so finding a root cause is diffcult. Bob -