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A three drive system - the sweet spot

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Vurbal:
A properly sized unit from a reputable name such as Corsair, Antec, Seasonic, or PC Power & Cooling are all good bets. You don't need to spring for expensive 'enterprise' grade models. Units built for workstation deployment are just fine. Put a good UPS in front of them and Bob's yer uncle.

It's the no-name Asian imports that go for <$50 you want to avoid.
-40hz (March 26, 2014, 06:03 AM)
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That's more true today than it was in the past. It wasn't that long ago some name brands (I'm looking at you CoolerMaster) sold mostly flaky PSUs. I say sold because the vast majority of quality power supplies are made by Seasonic and Corsair. Companies like Antec do some assembly and add some touches of their own but the core comes from another factory fully assembled. I could have sworn there was a third OEM but I could be wrong. At any rate most name brands have switched to building their PSUs from either Corsair or Seasonic internals, including CoolerMaster, so quality has generally taken an upward turn.

For anyone who wants to educate themselves on PSU technology I highly recommend reading through some of the reviews at JonnyGuru. They include thorough testing under load and in-depth details about internal components and build quality. Also you can usually find out who the OEM for a particular model or line is.

Vurbal:
I've never really considered quality of power supply.

Does a normal consumer-grade UPS help with this kind of thing?-mouser (March 26, 2014, 02:41 AM)
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I've never had an UPS and I live in an area that suffers brown-outs and power failures, (lots of trees don't go well with overhead lines).

I do, however, have very good quality surge suppression/filtering power boards and I've never lost a piece of equipment that was plugged into them yet ... and I've had them for ~20 years.

It's line noise/ripple current that is a very good killer of the inferior quality capacitors used in some switchmode PSUs.  The ripple causes the capacitors to heat up, the electrolyte dries out, the ESRw rises, current across the capacitor rises, heat increases, etc, etc, then the PSU dies ... sometimes taking whatever it's attached to.

The better you can filter the incoming AC to eliminate any noise/ripple and surges, the better it's going to be for your PSU.-4wd (March 26, 2014, 06:07 AM)
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Also, a crap PSU will create ripple from clean AC and even without any real surges ripple will definitely shorten the life of just about any electronics component.

Most UPS include some form of surge suppression/filtering, the quality is usually commensurate with the cost.  Almost all consumer, (not business), grade UPS are of the Stand-by type.  They don't do anything until the power fails, until then they're just a power board with surge suppression/line filtering.

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Absolutely. You should always use an online (aka continuous) UPS whenever possible. Besides the fact the battery backup in a standby UPS may not kick in fast enough, using the battery as the primary, rather than secondary, power source typically means more electrical isolation. Isolation is a key factor in surge suppression. Besides which, the filtering in a standby UPS is usually pretty unreliable.

That's also where proper grounding comes in very handy. Nothing protects against surges better than bleeding the excess current away to ground. It will increase the chances your protection circuitry survives a big event caused by something like lightning or a damaged transformer on the pole outside. It also makes a different in brownout conditions since brownouts are usually accompanied by spikes.

In my neighborhood the power is realtively clean but we do have intermittent brownout issues. The power lines run through back alleys and the power company can't be  bothere to trim the tree branches around them aggressively enough. They actually do a great job on power lines that run along the street but those are less work and more visible to the public. On a windy day the chances of the lights flickering at least once or twice is pretty high.

When we moved in we had to have the breaker box capacity upgraded for an electric dryer and I had the electrician put in a grounded circuit and new outlets for the computers in my office. At the time I didn't have a UPS for my server so every time the lights flickered it went down. After plugging it into a properly grounded outlet that stopped entirely. If the monitor is on it will shut off but generally the computer stays up. It has a UPS now so that's not an issue at all but still I wouldn't plug it into an ungrounded outlet if I could avoid it.

Be that and all, a crap PSU is still a crap PSU, a good filter will only make it last a little longer.

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And won't stop it from damaging your computer during that time. Also IME a cheap power supplies are more prone to failing spectacularly, taking out the motherboard - sometimes the CPU and/or RAM as well.

+1 with @40hz about a quality PSU but I'd also throw in a good quality line filter before it.

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If you have particularly poor power conditions - like almost any rural area here - it's even a good idea to have a separate line conditioner before a UPS. It will extend the life of the UPS, and likely the life of the battery as well. Unless things have changed considerably since the last time I had a UPS battery die (it's been a few years), it's almost as expensive as a new UPS. Plus you'll probably be able to either spend less on the UPS or get more capacity (ie time) for the same money if you don't need superior filtering.

Of course, the best filtering available in a UPS isn't equivalent to a good dedicated line conditioner anyway.

40hz:
re: power supplies

Since we're naming names, I prefer to get a PS from PC Power & Cooling. Not cheap by any stretch. But they last through a couple of builds before you need to retire them. So they're a bargain in the long run IMHO. PCP&C supplies (especially their premium TurboCool models) will get a workstation through anything for the foreseeable future even if their price tag may induce nosebleed in about 30% of the population.

I've also had very good luck with the Corsair brand which gives you very similar specs to the PCP&C, but at a considerably lower price point.

For a home or SOHO PC I'd go with Corsair if building one today. For a serious production workstation - or a client build - I'd definitely specify a TurboCool even though it ends up getting changed (to save cash) more often than not.

 8)

Vurbal:
More efficient, yes. But I'm not that sure about the amount of power being consumed.

- RAM consumes a lot of power nowadays, because it needs to read and write very fast.
- A hard disk consumes a lot of power, because it reads and writes quite fast (at least as fast as the mechanics allow for).
- A pen drive consumes hardly any power, but forget fast reading and writing.

Guess where an SSD fits in this list. Now there are advantages with the SSD. Although it draws a lot of power, it doesn't do so the whole time. Not in a similar fashion as a mechanical drive has to, at least. So yes, more efficient it will be, but don't underestimate the power consumption when it's active.-Shades (March 25, 2014, 08:17 PM)
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I should have been clearer about what I meant since efficiency is a pretty nebulous term. That's what I get for posting from a tablet.

There are obviously multiple kinds of efficiency which have varying effects. I was referring primarily to the percentage of energy converted into work vs the amount lost as heat. And, of course, the general efficiency of purely electrical components without motors to turn the spindle or move write heads. That should tend to make SSDs cooler on average.

However you make an excellent point about power usage over a shorter time frame. While a traditional HDD will probably require more instantaneous power when it spins up the platters, that increased efficiency for accessing and transferring data will mean longer, and perhaps higher, peaks for the purely electronic components. Those peaks are what your cooling strategy needs to be designed around.

And you are completely right about the quality of the PSU in a PC and the quality of the power that "feeds" the CPU. Proper grounding your grid works wonders, using small power groups also helps a lot. In the Netherlands an average house uses about 5 16 Ampere circuit breakers. Usually one for the (master) bath room, one for the kitchen, one for the living/hallway/toilet, one for the bedrooms/attic/toilet, one for the washing machine and one for a garden/shed.

All these small grids practically do not affect each other, whenever there is an appliance connected that is known to generate spikes in a grid ((older) fluorescent light elements, washing machine, dish washer, micro wave, power tools, blow dryers). Saves you already a lot of headache and the appliances that are more or less permanently attached to the 220 Volt grid really last longer. 

You really should take a look sometimes with a scope to your power grid when it is in normal use. You would be amazed how "dirty" the power in your house is.

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I don't own a scope but fortunately I have a pretty good feel for how dirty the power is. It may be a little less dirty since we had some upgrades done, including new wiring from the transformer to the masthead. The wiring from the masthead to the meter turned out to be better than I expected. It's definitely been upgraded at least once, perhaps even twice. It's definitely not the same wiring that was put in for the initial 60A service almost 100 years ago and possibly more recent than the initial 100A upgrade.

However I also know the grounding didn't get upgraded like it should have. We added a ground spike for the new outlets in my office but none of the other outlets are connected to it.

Vurbal:
re: power supplies

Since we're naming names, I prefer to get a PS from PC Power & Cooling. Not cheap by any stretch. But they last through a couple of builds before you need to retire them. So they're a bargain in the long run IMHO. PCP&C supplies (especially their premium TurboCool models) will get a workstation through anything for the foreseeable future even if their price tag may induce nosebleed in about 30% of the population.

I've also had very good luck with the Corsair brand which gives you very similar specs to the PCP&C, but at a considerably lower price point.

For a home or SOHO PC I'd go with Corsair if building one today. For a serious production workstation - or a client build - I'd definitely specify a TurboCool even though it ends up getting changed (to save cash) more often than not.

 8)
-40hz (March 26, 2014, 11:04 AM)
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That brand jarred something loose in the cobwebs of my memory so I went over to JonnyGuru to re-read a couple reviews and realized my earlier post on power supplies and OEMs was off.

There are actually 2 primary high end OEMs for tower/desktop power supplies. Seasonic has always (as long as I've known about them anyway) been the best in terms of consistent high quality. Next was SuperFlower, who always made good top end units as well, but weren't always the most consistent with their lower tier models. Over the last few years they seem to be right up there with Seasonic across the board.

Corsair isn't an OEM in the same sense. They buy the primary power supply components, typically from second tier Chinese OEMs, but typically use high quality Japanese filter capacitors and rectifier circuitry. The result is usually a higher quality PSU than you generally get from other companies using the same basic OEM base. Corsair is also sort of an OEM in their own right since I know at least some low end Antec PSUs are (or used to be) basically Corsairs in an Antec housing.

Other quality power supplies fall into 2 categories. Most are Seasonic or SuperFlower PSUs (occasionally Delta but I they're more in the rackmount CPU segment IIRC) with very minor variations. That typically just means things like changing the housing, fan(s), and/or modular cable configuration.

Then there are at least 2 companies, Enermax and PC Power & Cooling, who start with Seasonic or SuperFlower core units as a basis for their own designs. Sometimes those designs are very close to the OEM models but sometimes they find little design tweaks to make them even better. What they're really know for, though, is getting all the little manufacturing details right. At the top end little details like soldering quality can be a big deal.

Of those 2, PC Power & Cooling is probably the more consistent, quality-wise, since they don't seem to be interested in servicing anything but the top end of the market. However as long as you're comparing Enermax models at around the same price point it's hard to go wrong with either one. At the bottom end of the scale I'd start with Corsair and Antec. For the majority in between those extremes it's a lot easier to find good models across a lot of brands.

Just from memory, I also seem to recall PP&C being big in PSUs for industrial settings. That probably helps explain their reputation for build quality.

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