Alienware

[Snowreap]

it's built-in, but "built-in obsolescense" is a bad way to describe it.

power supplies aren't designed to fail after x years, they're designed to last for x years. they usually last longer because if you want 95% of your power supplies to last x years, that means that 50% of your power supplies are probably going to last a lot longer than that.

also, it's very easy to have large numbers of them, all made the same way using the same parts, to all fail at the same time. what's hard is to predict exactly when that will be. so when you have multiple devices fail at once, it's not because they were designed to fail at that time, but rather because they were not designed with internal variations to spread out the failures.

this is why when you buy drives for a RAID array, you shouldn't buy all your drives at once -- you need to spread out your purchases to avoid the situation where multiple drives fail at once. I recently asked my wife to order 2 3TB drives for a new RAID array, and asked her to order one from NewEgg and the other from Amazon to avoid getting 2 drives from the same manufacturing batch (which can easily happen if you order both from the same vendor).

-ken