On 7/1/19 10:38 AM, John McGaw wrote:
On 7/1/2019 11:20 AM, philo wrote:
On 7/1/19 9:59 AM, John McGaw wrote:
On 6/30/2019 7:00 PM, philo wrote:
On 6/30/19 9:29 AM, John McGaw wrote:
On 6/26/2019 9:27 AM, philo wrote:
I've repaired thousands of machines and once in a while have seen
a failed power supply take out a motherboard.

Only once though have I seen the hard drives taken out.

It was with a good quality supply and I thought it was just a very
odd fluke.


Last night I talked to someone who had also had it happen ,....so
my question is:


Does any manufacturer have a supply with fully surge-protected
OUTPUT?


I assumed they all did.

I, too, have had one PSU misbehave and take out a hard drive but
that was a very long time ago and with a no-name PSU. I learned my
lesson after that and now use nothing but Seasonic supplies, at
least in situations where they make a supply that will fit. Right
now the only computers I own that don't have Seasonic are my
Shuttle cubes and they are tied to the form-specific equipment.
Luckily the Shuttle PSUs have proven to be faultless also.

I don't know of any maker that installs crowbar protection on their
supplies although I believe it would take little more than a
high-current SCR a Zener diode and a few other passive components
to work the magic.



All I know is that for industrial use MOV's were everywhere and they
worked.

That said, If I try my own modifications I'll do it on a
non-critical machine first.


Will also look into Seasonic PSU's, thanks

Oh, I've use MOVs for various things but the problem is that they
aren't all that precise. Great at absorbing and dissipating lots of
power but the voltage at which they operate are vague at best. I've
used bushels of them protecting broadcast and computer equipment from
line transients but I'd be hard pressed to set them up to protect a
12V circuit from going above 13.5V where damage to a hard drive might
be expected to begin. A glance at some spec sheets suggests that
using a 12V MOV the clamping voltage might be 40+. But if you decide
to give it a shot and make it work well, please let up know.




Well, if I install MOV's and never have a HD burn out again it still
does not prove they did the trick.


I have a few other ideas though.


The person I know who lost two drives had a RAID 1 (mirrored) so he
thought he was safe.

Now I see that one possible way to build a reliable machine would be
to have each drive powered by a completely separate supply and
probably from a different manufacturer.


That said, it's been my experience in life that no matter what you
plan for, something else is going to happen!

Maybe I'll just continue doing backups because to reinstall the OS is
not a big deal...all that's important it the data

There is no substitute for backups. No matter what. I am quite paranoid
about protecting my primary machine. As I write this it is doing its
monthly backup which will go into the bank's vault this afternoon --
there are three portable drives cycling through these backups. Every
evening it does a full backup to my elderly WHS and at 1AM it did a
backup to one of my redundant Drobo NAS units. Oh, and as the mood
strikes me I do a system disk image to a series of portable SSD units
that are kept in a media safe here at home in case I need to restore a
bootable image. I have been burned too many times by seemingly random
glitches. This level of backup would be overkill for most people but I
believe that any user who doesn't have at least two levels of backup,
one of them offsite but under his/her direct control, is a fool and
probably deserves whatever comes their way.


I back up often so I guess I will quit worrying about this