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3 questions: 1. What's the lifetime of an individual battery? 2. Are the batteries replaceable? 3. Will we ever see this tech in consumer level PC power supplie

by mark-r 11y ago

3 questions: 1. What's the lifetime of an individual battery? 2. Are the batteries replaceable? 3. Will we ever see this tech in consumer level PC power supplies? If we did, would it be of any use in an environment without backup generators?

rtkwe 11y ago
1.) Judging from their cost graph [0] it seems to be about 3-4 (definitely less than 5). I'm guessing that the points where the costs increase is due to batteries wearing out and having to be replaced. 2.) Probably? The cost bumps in 1 don't make much sense otherwise. 3.) Hard to tell, in a home system there isn't such a huge cost savings to be had with a battery. As for usefulness it's a really short term battery but it'd be good enough to let the system power-down/suspend gracefully instead of losing power immediately. That niche is pretty well served by UPSs for people who care though and everyone else doesn't care already. It might find a small niche for consumers but it won't be ubiquitous. [0] http://www.theplatform.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/open-compute-microsoft-les-benefits.jpg http://www.theplatform.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/open-c...
- mark-r 11y ago
  Now that I think about it, a power supply that held power just long enough to go into hibernation automatically would be very useful. There would need to be some signalling into the OS though.
  - MertsA 11y ago
    We already have support for this in every OS, it's no different than a laptop or existing UPSs. What sucks is that to work with a generic ATX motherboard without a special header to hook into the best externally accessible bus to put it on is probably going to be USB. It's not like you would need to plug it in outside the case either, there's usually a spare USB header anyways. But hypothetically, APC could make an ATX UPS today that would be compatible with most ATX motherboards and leverage most of their existing software and drivers to do so.
    - tracker1 11y ago
      It would be interesting to see the power supply internalized, or externalized with a UPS battery... would probably passthrough/convert, similar to many mITX systems..
    - mark-r 11y ago
      I just worked on a PC this weekend, and all the internal USB connectors went to sockets on the front panel. But it should be possible to put a socket on the back of the power supply and include a 1 foot cable. This is doable!

by mark-r 11y ago

rtkwe 11y ago

1.) Judging from their cost graph [0] it seems to be about 3-4 (definitely less than 5). I'm guessing that the points where the costs increase is due to batteries wearing out and having to be replaced. 2.) Probably? The cost bumps in 1 don't make much sense otherwise. 3.) Hard to tell, in a home system there isn't such a huge cost savings to be had with a battery. As for usefulness it's a really short term battery but it'd be good enough to let the system power-down/suspend gracefully instead of losing power immediately. That niche is pretty well served by UPSs for people who care though and everyone else doesn't care already. It might find a small niche for consumers but it won't be ubiquitous. [0] http://www.theplatform.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/open-compute-microsoft-les-benefits.jpg http://www.theplatform.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/open-c...

mark-r 11y ago
Now that I think about it, a power supply that held power just long enough to go into hibernation automatically would be very useful. There would need to be some signalling into the OS though.
- MertsA 11y ago
  We already have support for this in every OS, it's no different than a laptop or existing UPSs. What sucks is that to work with a generic ATX motherboard without a special header to hook into the best externally accessible bus to put it on is probably going to be USB. It's not like you would need to plug it in outside the case either, there's usually a spare USB header anyways. But hypothetically, APC could make an ATX UPS today that would be compatible with most ATX motherboards and leverage most of their existing software and drivers to do so.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    It would be interesting to see the power supply internalized, or externalized with a UPS battery... would probably passthrough/convert, similar to many mITX systems..
  - mark-r 11y ago
    I just worked on a PC this weekend, and all the internal USB connectors went to sockets on the front panel. But it should be possible to put a socket on the back of the power supply and include a 1 foot cable. This is doable!