This is a placeholder topic for “Raspberry Pi Flash Drive 128GB” comments.
The only USB flash drives officially recommended for Raspberry Pi OS.
Read more.." and best of all - reliability."
But there is no published MTBF?
Is this a “trust me bro” type situation?
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Hi Martyn
Welcome
You would be lucky to find this for any of this class of product.
I don’t think too many would know what MTBF stands for.
For those that don’t let us enlighten you
MTBF = Mean Time Between Failure"
or in other words the mean time of device operation before a failure could occur. Believe me there is a lot of research and calculation involved to come up with this figure.
In all fairness if manufacturers need to go to market at some of the ridiculous low prices for some items producing and publishing something like this would push prices through the roof.
It goes with the old saying, “you gets what you pays for”.
Cheers Bob
Ps: Most government and military supplies require this number. One of the last major projects I worked on before retirement required a “Mean Time To Repair”. And this was 30 minutes. I once had to re do a whole cabinet rack layout because replacing the fan in one unit would take longer that the 30 min required,
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Hey @Martyn177102,
You’re right, it would be nice if this there was an MTBF, but as Bob said at the maker class of product you’re unlikely to find this sort of information.
The point is more that they are leaning on ‘reliability’ as being a key factor in differentiating their product, but give no justification or comparison.
More reliable than..? SD cards? Other similarly priced USB sticks? 3.5” floppy disks? Who knows.
The data sheets are usually pretty comprehensive, so it surprised me to see these ones lacking.
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Martyn
Depending on complexity providing an MTBF figure can be a long expensive task. I have not been directly involved but have worked alongside engineers tasked with this exercise.
EVERY component used in a device has to be researched and individual performance evaluated to arrive at an overall figure. No doubt there some standard formulae for this but it takes quite a bit of valuable time and you probably have to have traceability back to even batch figures.
These days you are lucky to get the value of a component supplied without looking to provide a MTBF. and the way some devices are built with no ID markings on Mosfets etc you would not get to first base.
And most importantly if this info was mandatory it is likely that you or I could not afford to purchase them.
Incidentally in the aviation sector EVERY COMPONENT has to be traceable back to manufacturer and batch number. If a repeated failure of a specific component and batch occurs every instance of that component is removed from spares shelves and equipment at the next service and taken completely out of the system. Sent for investigation and probably destroyed.
So you and I can fly safely. That used to be the way it went but I am not sure these days, probably the same. (I would hope)
Cheers Bob
I think if you read between the lines in places like this forum “reliability” is a dirty word in some circles.
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