Lead-free solder and tin whiskers: Older than you think

[gilly1984]

Re: Lead-free solder and tin whiskers: Older than you think

What is a tin whisker? Still pretty new to all this.

[Agent24]

Re: Lead-free solder and tin whiskers: Older than you think

What is a tin whisker? Still pretty new to all this.

Basically a crystalline structure that "grows" on some metallic surfaces. In electronics it's particularly bad as it can create short circuits which leads to either erratic operation, general failure or things letting out the magic smoke.

Not so much a problem with leaded solder, as the lead prevents them from growing, but with the new lead free, it can be a big issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_%28metallurgy%29

[arrenbrayshaw]

Re: Lead-free solder and tin whiskers: Older than you think

Oh man.... reading this thread makes me feel like I want to facepalm myself.

So many assumptions and so many guesses...

Rulycat ... whiskers are caused by the TIN in the solder, so any solder with TIN will have whiskers. Any solder including the leaded kind has whisker problems... lead was just good at reducing the frequency and slowing down the whisker creation process.

Shoker, as far as I know there was no banned chemical due to RoHS involved in vias. VIAs are made with a relatively simple process, by electroplating copper, so there's no lead or other substances involved.
I don't get what you say by "tarnishes".. is it layer of oxide? Maybe the person smoked in the house? Anyway, why would it matter if it's "tarnished" - it's a damn via ... a copper line that goes through the PCB. Doesn't matter what gunk or whatever is over it.

Go through this walkthrough if you want and see how prototype pcb, there's a detailed presentation with short clips for each step... including RoHS compatible through holes and vias:

http://www.eurocircuits.com/index.ph...ctional-movies



This is so STUPID on several levels.

Just because a technology has increased failure rate, it's bad that we use it?

The market demanded 1-2 TB drives, which were impossible to make without perpendicular recording. Maybe you don't WANT 1-2 TB drives, but maybe you're in the minority, maybe you're not their market.

Without perpendicular recording, you would have had 5-6 platters, slow rotation speed (4200-5400rpm), big access times due to inertia, hot drives. The failure rate would probably have been higher due to all these factors compared to just using perpendicular recording.

IF you care about your data, or you have concerns, there's NOTHING stopping you from using RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, RAID whatever, to secure your data.

NO drive has infinite MTBF, all drives have a warranty, the manufacturer doesn't say they'll live forever, why do you expect that all drives would have the same reliability over time? Nobody guaranteed you anything.

By all means, stick to 40-80 GB if you're that grumpy old guy shouting "get off my lawn" while younger folks can very well pay the same price you would have paid for a 80 GB drive back then and buy two 1 TB drives and have them in RAID 1.
It's not Seagate's fault or any other manufacturer that you're too cheap to secure your data. They make drives with more disk space while cheaper than ever.

Oh man.. sorry about the rant, but seriously... one more thing. Just because YOU have a poor experience with some hard drives, doesn't mean that it applies to everything. Maybe something in your computer is causing these issues... maybe an imbalanced fan inducing vibrations, maybe it's power spikes that kill that chip, it can be lots of things.

If you want to see a very thorough test on hard drives, Google did one and published the results:

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population: https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...2e3239963e.pdf

They did find a lot of interesting stuff... read the pdf and learn something... but they didn't find anything out of the ordinary with any particular series of drives.

it's useful, thank you