Is it possible to damage the memory chip by overloading it?

[menara]

Hi Korg community

I'm facing a hardware failure : no boot, black screen et only the power button's led et the Hdd are switched on.

Since there is no official Korg service center in my country, i was lucky enough to find a skilled technician and most of all a new cpu board (thank to korg France).

When i asked the technician about the causes behind this, he told me that the memory chip has a burning trace and overloading the memory could damage it. he didn't find any traces of corrosion, humidity, etc. and according to him, no electrical overload is to blame since the audio board wasn't damaged.

You can see here the burning trace : https://imgur.com/Ftz2Qe2

I have to recognize that i'm using a huge set (1,3 Gb of compressed samples, 15000 samples and almost all the user sound and keyboard set slots are used).

I also want to stress that my Pa4x (5 years old) is always protected by a EATON UPS, used at home in a large, cool and dry room and never exposed to the sun or dust.

So my question is in the title and should i reduce the amount of the samples i'm using ?

i hope those of you using large sets share their experiences

[musiccankill]

Hello,
This is the EMMC of the system which stores the files and is used for streaming.
It is the same as the chips used in mobile phones, tablets and a lot of other portable devices.
They can't be damaged by overloading.
The only thing that could damage them is overvoltage or hardware failure due to aging or production issue of the chip itself.
Pa4x uses the chip to read the samples from it in realtime in version 3.0+ (NEXT os) and so it stresses it out and wears it at a higher rate that it was originally designed, especially if you constantly load/reload sets/bkps or use the internal memory for storage all the time.
Having said that, it still wouldn't burn from aging.When the time comes to fail from aging, it stays at a read only state and there is no data loss so thats not your case here.
I would like to buy the faulty board from you to try to revive it if you don't need it.
Send me a pm if interested.
I have successfully changed the emmc on a pa900 board which had gone read only due to aging (it needed activation as the ID of the emmc changed but i managed to trick it) but i m not sure it will work on a dead board, so this is a chance to figure that out too!

[korg1]

So,Ups ,faulty product or aging caused this?

[musiccankill]

Ups is not the one to be blamed for sure. It is way too rare to do harm.
Now aging is not it too most probably as it failed catastrophically. So hardware failure must be it. It is logical though, it is electronics and electronics do fail after some time even without obvious reason and thats why the manufacturers do give warranty.

[menara]

Thank you musiccankill, i do appreciate your comments.

I would like to give more information about my case :
when i was cutting/pasting a multi selection of keyboard sets from a user location to an other user slot, i had an error message saying "An error occurred while copying ..". (i don't remember exactly the message)

Then, each time i selected a keyboard set, it got automatically deleted.

I taught it was just a software bug, so i switched off the Pa4x and waited 5 seconds. When i switched it ON, the screen was stuck on the Korg Logo.

I switched it Off for the second time and after that, the Pa4x was bricked.

So my reaction to the "bug" or/and the way how i stressed my emmc chip during the last year (endless hours of loading/editing long samples) are maybe in relation with the problem.

Concerning my initial question, what i understand is that using extensively the streaming memory (multiple erase and write actions) can reduce drastically the life time of the emmc chip and changing the whole cpu board is the only official solution to a worn out emmc chip.

Changing the cpu board after 5 years of use is not a problem for me. I just hope that the new one will last at least 3 or 4 years and that parts will stay available.

Since streaming/loading/editing samples is a key feature, to enhance the reliability of their next flagship arranger, i think that Korg should :
- Add an internal and removable battery to protect the boards;
- Use a SLC removable SDD instead of a soldered MLC emmc chip (MLC chips aim the gaming market and have an average mean time before failure of 4,75 years);
- Find a way to definitely avoid memory corruption and boot problems (specific rom for the bios, dual boot partitions, etc.);
- Give us information about the health status of the memory chip.