Last Updated on November 22, 2018 by Dave Farquhar
If you’re in the market for some new PC gear, it helps to measure reliability and quality of hardware. How do you measure that? How about buying the one that induces the least buyer’s remorse? That’s an approach you can take with the data from Hardware.fr. It’s in French, but Google Translate works.
This doesn’t measure long-term reliability–only DOA rate and short-term reliability–but it’s data I haven’t seen before, so I think it’s a welcome resource.
What was hot in 2014? Gigabyte motherboards, Antec power supplies, Kingston RAM, Seagate hard drives, PNY graphics cards, and Samsung SSDs. Keep in mind in some categories it was a tight race. An ideal return rate is one percent or less, and no motherboard maker achieved that, though one-percenters exist in all of the other categories. Some are significantly below one percent.
It’s notable that all motherboard makes that they track are above two percent, which is a poor rate of return, and the brands they track are the good brands. I don’t think I want to know the return rate on second- and third-tier boards. The moral of the story: Burn in your system after you build it. Especially when giving electronics as a gift.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Hi!
I’ve been reading your blog for a little over a year now – it was a random find, but I decided to add it to my rss feed in short order.
You wrote about using self encrypting drives on mother boards that don’t support the ATA security extension here, but there’s one problem with the solution that you gave there – Arne Fitzenreiter’s bios doesn’t support AHCI, and his project doesn’t seem to be updated any more, however Tobias Kaiser was inspired by Arne Fitzenreiter’s work and developed a solution that, although not as feature rich, does support AHCI.
I thought you might find it interesting, and maybe you’ll even write about it.
I’m sorry for posting this as a comment, but I couldn’t find your email address.