How Many Are Using an Uninterruptbile Power Supply For Their External Hard Drive?

[Mister Wednesday]

Hello all,

 

Just curious about how many of you are using an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for their external hard drive?

 

What brought this on was an unusual for my area power outage over this past weekend. Luckily i wasn't using my computer music system so everything was powered off including my Drobo external hard drive where my complete music collection resides so i got away lucky this time. But it made me think right away that if i had been using my system either for playback or for ripping to the Drobo when the power cut out I could have lost everything to a disk corruption.

 

Short story - I immediately went out and bought a UPS to which I've connected my Drobo. No need to connect my MacBook Pro to the UPS as it has its own internal battery. I just need a UPS with enough power to allow me to properly dismount and shut down my Drobo and computer to avoid any possible disk corruption. Because i only need enough power and time to shut down m system properly I got away with buying an APC BE-550G UPS for very little money. I've made a habit of shutting off my system whenever I'm not using it so I don't have to worry about not being at home to do this if there's a power outage if i'm not at home

 

Regards to all,

 

Mister Wednesday

 

[audiozorro]

For years I used to use Uninterruptible Power Supply units on all of my desktop/tower computers. However one day, when fortunately I was at home, I noticed that one of the UPS was smoking. It was an APC sealed unit but I don't remember the model number. If I was asleep or not at home I'm sure it would have started a fire and possibly burned my house down. The odds of this happening again or to you is very small but my one experience was an eye opener.

 

I still use two expensive Tripp Lite UPS on two of my computers but I doubt that I would ever buy another UPS again. I have lost power to my computers and external hard drives that are not on any UPS, but I never experienced data corruption. I am an advocate of surge/spike protection and having an external backup hard drive of any of my valuable data or music. I never turn off my computer music servers or the other two data computers that are on UPS. I always turn off my MacBook Pro laptop when I'm not using it since the battery does get hot.