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Non-Tech : Iomega Thread without Iomega -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ken Pomaranski who wrote (804)	7/30/1998 11:49:00 AM
From: D.J.Smyth	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10072

<<Actually, flash interfaces are entirely solid-state (except for the connector) with no mechanical parts whatsoever. This results in an extremely reliable, rugged solution>> oh? my $500 digital flash unit, purchased 6 months ago was just returned to the manufacturer as it was "defective". it wasn't dropped, mishandled, all that. return rates are higher. MTBF of 3 million hours. yah. it's probably NOT the flash unit that is failing, but an interface to the unit. nevertheless, the entire camera must be replaced. something is very touchy in those units, flash unit or not. used mine less than 50 hours since December. i spoke with representatives of Target (Dayton Hudson) about return rates on their flash units sold last Christmas. "high" was their response. they're looking at replacing several models. not a scientific sample, but i would imagine the same elsewhere.

To: Ken Pomaranski who wrote (804)	7/30/1998 3:46:00 PM
From: FuzzFace	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10072

<CLIK! on the other hand quotes an MTBF of 100,000 hours. This actually is really bad. This equates to an annual failure rate (AFR) of about 10% per year. Yes, 10% of all CLIK! devices will fail per year.> The way I've heard MTBF explained is this (I'll use 100,000 hours.) If you had 100,000 of something all running at the same time, a failure will occur after a certain amount of time T1. Then you replace the failed unit, and keep going. You repeat this n times. Then when you average the values T1-Tn (where n is sufficiently large to make the test meaningful) it comes to 1 hour. That is, it takes 100,000 continuously running devices to average one failure per hour. Thus, to lose 10% of the 100,000, you will need to run them for about 10,000 hours. I seriously doubt that anyone will use their digital camera for 10,000 hours in a year since there are only 8760 hours in a non-leap-year. So where do you get your numbers from?