3 ms·

Like the author, I rarely see power interruptions that last more than a second or two (unless there's a major snowstorm or something). It's kind of annoying an

by lsllc 6y ago

Like the author, I rarely see power interruptions that last more than a second or two (unless there's a major snowstorm or something). It's kind of annoying and I'd love to see a solution that isn't just "get a battery based UPS" -- maybe something capacitor based, enough for say 15-30 seconds? I guess I could get a flywheel [0], but I don't think it'd fit in my basement. [0] https://www.vertiv.com/en-us/products/brands/liebert/?id=59 https://www.vertiv.com/en-us/products/brands/liebert/?id=59

pacaro 6y ago
Back in the late 90s I had a PC motherboard that had a capacitor for exactly this. I could (if i was quick) change which outlet the pc was plugged into without loss of uptime
- zantana 6y ago
  I also remember a green pc set up which used one of the low power x86 clones (Via?) in the 90s which used the bios battery double as a mini ups similar to that.
mprovost 6y ago
At the reasonably sized datacentre that I ran we had a voltage conditioner that also had "sag protection". It was an HPC shop and we decided that it wasn't worth the money to put the compute on UPS (just storage and core servers but the Top 500 machines ran off mains) but we still had 10s of millions of dollars worth of hardware that a lightning strike etc could fry. The conditioner provided a constant voltage to the servers and could correct "sags" where the voltage would drop, and it could keep things going for a few seconds if the power went off completely. As you say this took our total outages down from probably 10 a year to maybe 1 or 2 - most outages are quite short. Although looking at the graphs on this thing, there were pretty frequent surges and sags coming from the street, like when you see light bulbs flicker in your house. One other thing we noticed was that if there was a short interruption, all of the HP servers could survive for a second but the Dells turned off right away. Different power supplies store up some amount of power locally. https://new.abb.com/ups/power-and-voltage-conditioners/voltage-conditioners/pcs100-avc-40 https://new.abb.com/ups/power-and-voltage-conditioners/volta...
NAR8789 6y ago
You mean something like this? https://www.atx-upsu.com/ https://www.atx-upsu.com/ Looks like it's capacitor-based, removes the need for an inverter, and even has a clever way of communicating to the host, by taking over the power switch connector. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a price or where to buy. Would love to see more momentum around products like this, and marketing directed at home systems. EDIT: Thought of one more system that uses capacitors to limp to a clean shutdown--the Unifi Cloud Key Gen2. Again though, the power solution isn't packaged for consumer use. Though, maybe it'd be amusing to try to hack together a NAS out of Cloud Key Gen2 Pluses... there's a hard drive bay in each one ;D

by lsllc 6y ago

pacaro 6y ago

Back in the late 90s I had a PC motherboard that had a capacitor for exactly this. I could (if i was quick) change which outlet the pc was plugged into without loss of uptime

zantana 6y ago
I also remember a green pc set up which used one of the low power x86 clones (Via?) in the 90s which used the bios battery double as a mini ups similar to that.

mprovost 6y ago

At the reasonably sized datacentre that I ran we had a voltage conditioner that also had "sag protection". It was an HPC shop and we decided that it wasn't worth the money to put the compute on UPS (just storage and core servers but the Top 500 machines ran off mains) but we still had 10s of millions of dollars worth of hardware that a lightning strike etc could fry. The conditioner provided a constant voltage to the servers and could correct "sags" where the voltage would drop, and it could keep things going for a few seconds if the power went off completely. As you say this took our total outages down from probably 10 a year to maybe 1 or 2 - most outages are quite short. Although looking at the graphs on this thing, there were pretty frequent surges and sags coming from the street, like when you see light bulbs flicker in your house. One other thing we noticed was that if there was a short interruption, all of the HP servers could survive for a second but the Dells turned off right away. Different power supplies store up some amount of power locally. https://new.abb.com/ups/power-and-voltage-conditioners/voltage-conditioners/pcs100-avc-40 https://new.abb.com/ups/power-and-voltage-conditioners/volta...

NAR8789 6y ago

You mean something like this? https://www.atx-upsu.com/ https://www.atx-upsu.com/ Looks like it's capacitor-based, removes the need for an inverter, and even has a clever way of communicating to the host, by taking over the power switch connector. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a price or where to buy. Would love to see more momentum around products like this, and marketing directed at home systems. EDIT: Thought of one more system that uses capacitors to limp to a clean shutdown--the Unifi Cloud Key Gen2. Again though, the power solution isn't packaged for consumer use. Though, maybe it'd be amusing to try to hack together a NAS out of Cloud Key Gen2 Pluses... there's a hard drive bay in each one ;D