Hardware's hard facts

We just bought some toys to do a Tamias test deployment. We started small with just 15 nodes made of :

• A Barebone chassis that has motherboard, CPU, chipset and loads of integrated stuff we won't use : the Shuttle XS36V
• A 1TB 2.5" hard disk from Samsung
• A 2GB RAM stick from Elixir (unrelated to the card game, for you french readers)

Now, the law of large numbers predicts that for millions of hardware pieces, a few of them will be faulty. I was really interested to see how lucky we would be with the Tamias hardware, and here is the result for the case of not so large numbers :

Part	Qty bought	Qty faulty	Remark
Shuttle XS36V	15	2	Won't boot from USB key, but installs from USB CD
Samsung 1TB HDD	15	0	so far so good
Elixir 2GB RAM	15	2	1 won't P.O.S.T., 1 fails during Debian install

So that's it, 13% failure for RAM. I was expecting 1 failure and hoping for zero... The motherboard could be rated at 0% failure because it actually works, but we had to boot from a USB CD. I would have to check if the BIOS release is the same as the other 13 pieces, but since we got it to work, we decided not to RMA them. Memory was RMAd and replaced swiftly, Memtest86 (using debian memtest86+ packages) has passed so we expect no problems here either...