Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

I have a horror story with 700VA APC ES-B700G, I bought it for my NAS in case I would be updating its operating system not to have it turned off by random power loss.

I had issues with power supply to my apartment once in 2 years or something like that.

This model has "controlled by master" outlets which I did not use because I needed only backup lines connected to battery. That "controlled by master" thing would turn on once in 3 months without reason.

Then one day there was no power loss and UPS flipped and turned off power to my NAS and to my devices. Battery was good power was there but switches flipped and my NAS was turned off without warning. There was no system updates, maybe just normal writes to the disk.

Turned out my HDD WD-RED 1TB died because of that one flip. It would have been better for me not to have a UPS...

I’m sorry for your loss.

It sounds like you used a Back-UPS unit instead of a Smart-UPS, which I’ve heard switches to battery 10x faster than the Back-UPS.

After learning this I won’t use a Back-UPS for anything where meaningful data loss might happen. They’re great for lights, cable modems, WiFi routers, etc., though.

Thanks, it was just a faulty unit that I trusted too much.

I was doing turn off tests with my NAS attached and it was switching correctly and NAS was not going down, I had couple RPis connected also not going down and notifications from NUT were in logs. Where my NAS was NUT server and RPis had NUT client.

It was that one day when UPS malfunctioned in a bad time. Where my electricity provider was more reliable than UPS I owned. So bad risk management on my side.

What you want is any type of UPS that is line-interactive (Smart UPS or BackUPS Pro), those convert line voltage to 12V and back to line voltage with the battery in between instead of having to switch the battery into the circuit. Basically means that it switches (almost) instantly and they don't depend on external voltage or frequency.

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