Powercuts
August 1st, 2016
These are my computer specs,
Intel i5 3570K OCed to 4.5GHz
Gigabyte Z77 D3H
MSi 2GB HD 7850
8GB Corsair Vengeance
550W OCZ PSU
Alpenf�hn Matterhorn CPU Cooler
1TB HDD 7200RPM
120GB SSD
you will need a UPS I think.
Depending on how much you want to spend a surge protector or UPS
It all depends on what your trying to achieve. Surge Protector = If you wanna protect your PSU from being fried by a surge.
UPS = That+Preventing the loss of unsaved data (It’d also be used as backup power, It’d still
provide steady power to your PC & Monitor for 10-20 mins during an outage, Giving you enough time to save stuff and safely shut it down)
Do note however that the above is optional (surge protectors are cheap tho!)
You don’t have to buy anything to be honest.
You have a quality PSU, And that’s what really matters! These are more tolerant to power outages, And more importantly, have protections that will prevent it from frying your other components if it’d fail!
The big problem with power cuts is the hard drive – if you are writing or reading when the power dies then the head drops when the disc is still spinning = buggered HD
even a budget UPS will give you a 5 minutes or so to save your work and shut down normally – it’s well worth it if you get winter/storm power cuts.
The big problem with power cuts is the hard drive - if you are writing or reading when the power dies then the head drops when the disc is still spinning = buggered HD
Do you have anything to back this up? I don’t have a UPS and had dozens of outages during read/write operations and none of my HDDs went bad because of it! I also never heard of such a case.
I faced similar problem when there is powercut and pc is not shutdown properly, hard disk gets hit by a small fragment of electricity which later on turns out to cause some boot sector problem. Solution is to get UPS.
Best would be to get one UPS as others have suggested. It doesn’t have to be an expensive one thats lasts hours, just one that lasts for 15-20 minutes so you can shut down your computer is good enough.
The big problem with power cuts is the hard drive - if you are writing or reading when the power dies then the head drops when the disc is still spinning = buggered HD
Do you have anything to back this up? I don't have a UPS and had dozens of outages during read/write operations and none of my HDDs went bad because of it! I also never heard of such a case.
that used to cause problem a couple years back. But with modern hdds, that probablity has been decreased to > 0.01%.
And more importantly, have protections that will prevent it from frying your other components if it'd fail!
how would you do that? I mean what do I need to buy in that case?
The big problem with power cuts is the hard drive - if you are writing or reading when the power dies then the head drops when the disc is still spinning = buggered HD
Do you have anything to back this up? I don't have a UPS and had dozens of outages during read/write operations and none of my HDDs went bad because of it! I also never heard of such a case.
that used to cause problem a couple years back. But with modern hdds, that probablity has been decreased to > 0.01%.
And more importantly, have protections that will prevent it from frying your other components if it'd fail!
how would you do that? I mean what do I need to buy in that case?
Yah – forgot that – they have safe park routines for power failures now..
What does a surge protection do?
I use a couple of old 1200 VA Belkin UPS’s, nothing special, they are about 6 or 7 years old, just change the batteries every couple of years when they need changing (cheaper than buying a new one), they will keep my pc’s and monitors running for about 20 minutes, but I never use that long. I use the Bulldog shutdown software which is really good…(shuts down when you are not around)
http://www.belkin.com/pyramid/AdvancedInfo/UPS/Bulldog/faq.htm
Mind you, where I live in the UK we haven’t had a power cut for a few years, except when someone cut through an underground powerline, but we do get occasional brown-outs, where the power-surge feature comes in great.
What does a surge protection do?
A surge protector (or surge suppressor) is an appliance designed to protect electrical devices from voltage spikes. A surge protector attempts to limit the voltage supplied to an electric device by either blocking or by shorting to ground any unwanted voltages above a safe threshold.
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surge_protector
However, for power cuts, you’ll want to consider investing in a decent UPS system. That way you’ll atleast get the chance to save your data in the event of a power cut
it’s not the components, but the data on the hard drive that will be corrupted after a power failure. operating systems have “write caching” enabled by default, and any data contained in RAM is lost during a power failure. so your hard drive becomes corrupted. http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/cacheWrite-c.html it can be turned off, BUT, your computer will be very slow if you did that. the other problem is hard drives have a cache too, and imagine losing 64MB of data from that cache when the power goes out!.
I forgot to add this incase you didn’t realise ; if getting a UPS and you are NOT at your pc all the time it is running, then you will need to buy an on-line one (connected via USB and using shutdown software) otherwise if you use an off-line one and you are not around to shutdown the pc, then the UPS alarm will just sound/show, the pc and monitor etc will run on the UPS batteries until they die and then shutdown exactly as if you didn’t have a UPS connected.
This article shows that with a suitable UPS and software, you can have the system shut down properly before the UPS battery goes flat.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/33776/powerchute-makes-managing-your-apc-ups-easier-during-power-outages/
Or Windows does it here..
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/pwrmn_ups_configure_ups.mspx?mfr=true
This would be the way to go for unattended PCs.