[rescue] Fun With Statistics

[Leslie Connally]

Fun with Statistics
or
Reliability
or
Why I was an Art Major..


I know this is a heady newsgroup. You will know the answer.

A good friend here in  Dallas is an independant BMW mechanic.

He was telling me the new 5 series (?) now had 6 coils in them.. one for
each cylinder. We discussed how an old 2002 just needed one, and they never
ever failed anyway.
But then he said, they (the new coils) were shit coils nad went out all the
time. I said, "Good to have extras then I suppose", and he replied: "No, if
one goes out, the computer wont let the engine start, so the other five
dont matter".

So then I was thinking.. Do 6 coils  make the care MORE reliable? And he
said, NO. More Coils, More Chance of One Failing. It would be better to
have one shit coil than six.

Is he right?

Is one disk "more reliable"  than striping six RAID 0.

Is a 4 processor machine more likely to crap out than one with only one.

If one of four processors crap out, wont you get a kernal failure.. making
the other three unuseable ?  (yes I do know 4 processors are *not* for
*reliability*)

Curious minds want to know.