[GTALUG] War Story: Asus UX305ca SSD failures

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Alvin Starr via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| The lesson should be don't buy the least expensive product if you want
| reliability.

Not in this case.

| Most manufacturers will produce products that are scaled back with the least
| expensive components.

Not exactly the case for notebooks.

For one thing there are many fewer manufacturers (ODMs and OEMs) than
there aree brands.  Don't just look at the brand to discern quality.

There seem to be quality and price "bands".  But note that quality
isn't a single thing.  Much of what the higher-priced notebooks have
may be of no interest to you.

Here are some of the things that I've noticed about business notebooks and 
how important they are to me.

For example, businesses want a product that is available for years
(kind of like LTS Linux distros).  For my (one-off) purchases, I'd rather
the latest and greatest features.  I really don't need a VGA port!

Business sales take a lot more negotiation.  This often results in
padded list prices.

Businesses expect long term software support.  This as ALMOST useless
to me: I want to run Linux and most manufacturers don't support that.
The ones that do support distros I don't care about (but it still
would be useful to me).  The one bit that I do value: continuing
upgrades to the firmware.  That seems rare except in business-class
hardware.

Businesses seem to expect decent hardware manuals.  That's something I
value.

| I have a few "cheap" HP,ACER and Dell laptops that have been trashed in a
| couple of years in that category.

Cheap/inexpensive notebooks have been pretty good to me.  But I
generally know what I'm getting into.  If you don't want to waste your
time figuring this out, it is safer to throw money at the problem.

The Asus UX305ca was not a cheap notebook.  It is an Ultrabook(tm) so it 
is mechanically less robust than, say, a ThinkPad T<whatever>.
I've seen used models for sale at the price we paid for a new one three 
years ago.

| I would be willing to bet that Microsoft had Asus make a special production
| run with parts of "less expensive" quality so that they could meet that "good
| deal" price point.

That's not the Microsoft Store model.  They do sell standard vendor
hardware, with a couple of wrinkles:

- their supply chain seems to be US-based.  Evidence: they seem to sell 
  devices with US keyboards where the versions sold in places like Best 
  Buy have the Canadian Bilingual keyboards.

- The often sell "Signature Editions" which have clean-ish Windows
  loads (no crapware other that what is part of Windows).  That's the
  only difference.

They have sometimes been inept at pricing.  Sometimes non-competitive and 
sometimes (but rarely) very low.  I've wondered whether they don't always 
understand the difference between US$ and CA$.

| Remember. You only get what you pay for(on a good day).

A good first-order rule of thumb.  Not an inviolable law of nature.  I 
have fun discovering the cases where it does not apply.  I even post some 
of the examples to this list.

================

One thing that annoys me and might be relevant to our plight:

- the SSD (Micron M600) had a firmware update
  <https://media.digikey.com/pdf/PCNs/Micron/PCN_31973.pdf>

- the SSD crash we experienced might have been prevented by this
  firmware update

- the Micron update, as distributed, will not apply to OEM devices
  (the Micron firware utility will refuse)

- Asus never issued a version of the firmware update for its notebooks

This is Standard Operating Procedure for most vendors but I think that it 
is unconscionable.