I had an APC UPS battery age out on me, after only a couple of months after purchase. Back-UPS XS 1500. I called their customer support, and they asked about t

I had an APC UPS battery age out on me, after only a couple of months after purchase. Back-UPS XS 1500. I called their customer support, and they asked about the kind of equipment I had plugged into it. My main NAS motherboard had died, and I hadn’t gotten around to the full rebuild that was going to require. So I had ended up with about five or six cheap USB external drives, with those “wall wart” DC power supplies, strung along a couple of power strips that were plugged into the UPS. That plus a 27-inch iMac. It was generally not much power - not much surge to spin up, or to power up the Mac, and of course at idle was less than 100 Watts. APC Customer Support said that the power strips might actually be weirding out the battery. They sent me a replacement battery at no charge, and suggested that I go with a Smart-UPS, with their Power Distribution Units if I needed more outlets. I had always thought the rack-mount PDUs were a silly expensive replacement for a no-name power strip. But I had long had a keen interest in this sort of IT equipment fail, after witnessing some spectacular crazy failures in corporate, and losing the manuscript while I was writing a book on small-office IT practice. So I bought a basic PDU, and a Smart-UPS rated at something like 700 VA. That has been rock solid. Even better than a larger setup I had with some big CyberPower systems. I’m willing to go along with the cargo-cult of PDUs now. I would be quite surprised if there were any significant difference among the basic PDUs of well-known brands. I still have those USB drives. They’ve lasted about as long as the hamsters, not as long as the dogs.