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Comment by tomatocracy | Hacker News Reader

Even if you have no issues with spinup, insufficient power can result in silent data corruption, which can be quite frustrating to diagnose (even if ZFS will help you see it). The difference between a picoPSU and a decent "real" PSU in terms of power consumption at the wall is maybe a couple of watts in my experience - not worth the risk for most people.

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Is there a source for this?

Not sure. I experienced this personally using a picoPSU with spinning drives on one machine - no issues with spinup but silent data corruption on writes (which then got picked up by ZFS). Switching to a traditional PSU cured the problem.

Ok, I have running multiple machines with PicoPSU and never experienced this. In my opinion it is a pretty reliable consumer device.

However, thank you for pointing that out. I did not know that.

Can't say anything about picoPSU, except writing anything on RAID involves all the drives to seek and write and without a a solid power reserve you can receive a momentary dip of voltage which can lead for a malformed write, but back in mid-late 2000s I've seen enough HDDs failing and corrupting data which miracluosly behaved when moved to another machine or when you replaced PSU (with a decent one, not another $15 chinesium).

A lot of bad reputation of WD from that time is actually from the shitty PSUs, not the drives themselves.

Well, that's really interesting. If I ever experience these issues somewhere, I know where to start...

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