What is a good UPS? How powerful should it be?

[braincell]

Looking at Vista I noticed there are two boxes under drive tools which read something like this:

"Checking this box increases performance but makes it more likely that your drive will have damage if the power goes out."

"Checking this box makes your hard drive even faster but increases the chance you will damage your drive more. You should only check this box if you have a UPS."

Since I want the fastest possible speed, I need a UPS but the question is how powerful should it be?

I have a Core 2 Quad with 8 gigs and a 256 meg graphics card plus 2 hard drives and one sound card. I would like to add another hard drive and possibly another card in the future. The current PSU is 600 watts. The Monitor is a 42 inch LG flat screen LCD television.

I think 500 watts is good but another consideration is clean power. That will bring the price up I think.

[pollux]

these ones are very good.

[braincell]

That is good. I need 10 minutes because it's going to be less when it's old.

[kensuguro]

I remember I ran my TV with my UPS during Katrina because I was SO bored! Then I ran out and got a cigar socket to 120v adapter, and recharged the UPS with the car, took the UPS back inside the house.. and watched DVD. ha!

[braincell]

I have a little tv for the car in case that happens.

[valis]

Most likely those checkboxes were for writeback caching, can't imagine they were unchecked by default?

Writeback caching means that 'writes' to the disk are stored in memory temporarily, which means you could 'lose' data if power is lost to the computer. It doesn't mean that the drive itself will be *physically* damaged, just the information layer. Writeback caching translated means that file operations use a portion of system ram as a 'buffer', pages are written out to the disk as the kernel decides it's time to write.

The only other thing that could affect drive performance (and lifespan) is the system's power management modes, and how frequently the drives are spun up & down. I'm still anal and set my drives in my important machines to run 24/7 (never spin down). All of the machines here that DO spin drives down start losing data in about 2-4 years (meaning bad blocks, laptop HD's die even faster for me). My 2 main workstations have yet to lose a drive though I did have a NINE year old 36.7GB 10krpm SCSI drive start throwing up bad blocks in my older Xeon recently, and replaced it with a used 73GB 15k rpm model from a user on another forum (drive wasn't ever used, still in packaging as one of several 'backups' he kept for his hosting facility).

As far as UPS's go, there's a huge range of products available. The top models offer multi-phase power conditioning (3,4 or even 5 phase), Automatic Voltage Regulation (AVR, a series of relays connected to transformers to step incoming voltage up/down to keep it within 5-10% of what it should be), "Power Conditioning" (filtering for 'sine wave' output and RF rejection), Battery Backup and Surge protection. Each step down in price compromises one of these features or drops it entirely.

BEWARE that most battery-backup only products (like the APC Back-UPS pollux linked) will NOT output a sine wav, and in the worst case can output a SQUARE wave that will not play well with a lot of modern electronics, especially switched PSU's in your computer and LCD backlighting transformers (but this is why they're cheaper than the APC "Truepower" series.) You can try using a $50 'AVR' only unit after the Back-UPS to tone down the square wav a bit, but I keep my Back-UPS for the closet PC's which are 7-10 years old, draw less current and are dying anyway.

CyberPower & Tripp-lite are 2 companies that compete with APC and are generally held in decent regard, and are not only priced lower than APC but their consumer gear tends to be rated more accurately. APC started being 'creative' with their consumer gear's specs about 4 years ago, which means that you generally shoot for 65-75% of rated capacity for your actual usage. APC also changes models so frequently now that it's difficult to find replacement batteries. The reason for this is because it's actually perfectly reasonable to purchase a 3-4 year old unit (NOT 8-10 years) from Ebay that has used up its battery, and order a replacement battery for it. I know several people who have done this for home use, and wound up with a slightly older unit that would have cost $600-800 for about $3-400 all told.

You might have noticed that Monster & Furman also offer similar 'Power Conditioning' products for studio use, with similar steps in terms of features & functionality.

[braincell]

I noticed two boxes in Vista, (I have Vista 64 Ultimate) the first is checked by default and the second unchecked by default. I always turn off all power saving features but I will double check on the new machine. I think one of my external drives has that built in but I don't use it often. I didn't know that a good conditioner was so expensive but I guess that makes sense since most people are not looking for that. I guess it would be fair to say that a $300 new UPS would only have marginal conditioning? It would be cheaper to buy SpinRite and run that every time the power goes out. Maybe I should get a conditioner without a UPS and save some money. I have heard that line noise can affect audio quality. I live in a new house so I don't think that is a problem though. I don't get any hum.

[valis]

Hum would be a ground difference between connection points for your gear (using outlets across the room for gear that's interconnected) or RF leakage (usually more broadband or higher pitched than hum).

I actually use several filtering units and I've found I often need 2 inline, unless I purchase the pricey ones (I still eye the Monster ones occasionally). The beefier Tripp-lite units (linked below) that I have are capable of handling larger over/unders & do better filtering, but they step the power up in larger increments (like 10v steps). Which means they usually still wind up within spec but with big jumps as the relay switches (ie, a power transient when stepping between viltages) unders and overs wind up being 'corrected' to what is still a wide margin (I like to see my power stay within the 4% tolerances, especially for the PCs). So I hang my UPSs & smaller studio rack-based power conditioners off the main APC units. The UPS's & rack conditioners step in smaller increments to correct overs & unders and things seem much more stable this way.

I DO live in an old house, and have problematic power even though I have my studio in the same room as the power box and rearranged all the breakers so I have a dedicated one at the top for the studio alone (below the 220v breakers), the other things in the house (especially the fridge & washer/dryer) do impact my power more than I'd like. I also ran my own wiring & outlets in here, as the outlets upstairs proved to be old enough that there's significant current loss/resistance compared to the other end (at the breaker), due to old wiring & worn out/oxidized plugs at the outlet. I don't think it's necessary to be this anal for everyone, but I make a living using these machines so it's worth spending the money for me. Also I lost a Samsung 275t LCD ($1100) and a few other bits of gear within 2 months of moving in here, so I moved to do what I could without rewiring the whole house.

Anyway, back to the AVR & UPS units... When you look at the better AVR conditioners from Furman, Monster, Tripp-lite & APC you'll find that they're not exactly inexpensive on their own so getting that functionality in a better UPS is worthwhile, and the price makes more sense.

Getting a UPS with sine-wave output is the priciest option. My main UPS is a tripp-lite 1200w unit that I purchased in 1999 for princely sum ($600 iirc), it does sin-wave output and that model is no longer available so I can't recommend it, but I have had it recapped and replaced the battery, and it still does a great job today though I suspect it's nearing the end of its life.

Cyberpower units are showing up more in the better technical forums I frequent, but I haven't used them myself so I can't testify to their quality. I suspect this still isn't a sin-wave output, but if you shut your machine down fast enough it may not be too bad. If I were to look into purchasing one I'd read up on them more.

APC's Smart-UPS units are considerably more well regarded than their Back-UPS units, but are quite costly if you check. Tripp-lite units with Sin-wave output are still less costly and I think a better buy (though APC's higher end gear is still quality imo).

For AVR units, I have both this APC 10amp (1200va) unit which is inexpensive but I think is somewhat cheaply made (the power cord is thin and the unit & cord get warm when run with a full 8-10 amps) and I have this Tripp-lite unit which seems much more reliable. The APC actually just runs to my laptop, the furman conditioner that powers some rack gear & my synths. The Tripp-lite handles my main PC's 1200w UPS (8 core Xeon & 27" lcd connected to UP) and my other 2 LCD's (not connected to UPS), my studio monitors and some rack gear near my desk. Its never warm to the touch and seems stable.

[valis]

Btw it occured to me to respond to the 2nd question in the topic in more detail....

Personally, my concern with a UPS's power rating is less focused on battery runtime without power and more with longevity & ability to sustain clean power at a given current draw. Using a simple Kill-a-watt device (though it may not accurately represent some digital power supplies) can give you a baseline for operating current draw, then choosing a value between that and the maximum ratings quoted for your devices (as long as they're realistic) works for shorthand.

For instance my PSU in my computer is rated at 750w but I know from experience it rarely draws more than 300-350, even with a gaming card going full tilt. I knew that when I bought it and overspec'ed it enough to allow for upgrades & an estimated 3-4 years worth of loss in capacity due to aging. My main LCD monitor specifies 130w draw, but having looked at some of the presets using the Kill-a-watt, only the ones with 75% contrast and 50% brightness draw anything close to 100w. My calibrated setting used for design work adjusts that to contrast 60% and brightness 18%, for a 120nit luminosity (the 75/50 setting was over 250nit!) for a current draw of 70w. So a UPS that is rated for 900w gives more than enough headroom to trust it with a few extra peripherals, while going for a 600w unit would do in a pinch but may reduce the lifespan of the UPS or reduce its ability to deal with particularly nasty & extended voltage dips & spikes.

Runtime for the UPS battery without any power doesn't need to be longer than 5 minutes for my needs. If I'm not home the machine just needs to exit windows gracefully, and if I am there the time should be long enough to avoid needless shutdowns while I'm working with the local power company's occasional failing on switching with the power grid, which I see at ~6am at least 2-3 times a week (1-2 second losses in power).

So setting the computer's UPS control to warn for 1-3 minutes (to allow saving of work) and then automated shutdown within 30 seconds of that, with the UPS powered off 30 seconds later gives plenty of time and is all I need. Again the 600w UPS would probably work in a pinch, but I know from experience within a year or so the battery will be barely making it due to wear. And where I live the local utility has issues occasionally switching at the grid, giving the 1-2 second losses of power (usually at 6am). For me these are actually a much larger concern than actual outages (which occur rarely) as that hits gear with big transients, and a 600w UPS that isn't generously built may prove to be a liability after couple of years for my example here. So having something inline to handle those short outages and the transients that result is one of my primary concerns, along with handling the undervoltage conditions I frequently see.

[braincell]

Thanks!

I noticed there is a big price difference between 600 watts and 900 watts. I think I will go with $600 and replace the battery when needed. I will try and get one which lets you do that although I don't usually seee that feature listed in the spec sheet. We have the 2 second dropouts here too once in a while. A fast computer shuts down quickly.

[valis]

Somehow I deleted portions of several sentences. What I meant to say was that if I'm home and working shut-down time matters a bit more, but only as long as it takes to actually shut things down. What does NOT matter in terms of battery runtime is the 2-second 'glitch' outages from the power company. Those are essentially longer transient spikes which may cause switchover to the battery, but the important thing there is to have the gear isolated from the transient rather than needing 30 minutes of runtime. Again with cheaper UPS's, they may switch over to battery but it won't be as graceful as a better unit (and as mentioned above you may wind up with square wave output during the battery runout).

[braincell]

I have a Coolermaster PSU. It seems very good and is connected to the mobo through 3 cables. This is an advantage to building your own computer.