Help with sizing for UPS

[WannaTheater]

Hi, I'm at that time where I need to purchase a UPS for my unRaid box.  I don't have a "Watts" meter, and I don't want to "overbuy" a UPS.  The only thing connected to this UPS will be the unRaid box (no monitor, etc).  The box is nothing more than a motherboard, cpu, mem, and 14x500G drives (all running from a single 650W power supply).  Any suggestions on how many watts my backup should be?

 

Also, I've been looking at the Best Buy geeksquad versions.  I like the small form factor, but am unsure about the "no-name" aspect...

 

Thanks!

[Billped]

To properly answer the question, we also need to know how many minutes you expect this UPS to power the server.

 

If the objective is to keep it running for 10-15 minutes, you probably need a 1000VA/600W UPS.  I bought a 1300VA/800W (W =~ VA*.6) to run my smaller Unraid plus my main computer, monitor, and network.  My server by itself (with only five drives) uses under 200W at idle and maybe 250W when all drives are spinning.  Your 14 drive server will be about 100W more than mine when spun up.  If you run the UPS at half capacity, you will get no more than 20 minutes out of it - that drops to under 10 minutes when run at full capacity.

 

BTW, if you don't run anything but the server on the UPS, how will you gracefully turn off the server when the power goes out?  You will have no computer, keyboard, monitor, or network connection.  Or are you buying it solely for the power cleanup aspect?  Yes, when we get UPS support it should happen automatically.

 

I got an APC - check out my separate thread: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=961.0

 

 

Bill

[WannaTheater]

Thanks Bill.  I am more concerned about power cleanup... I live in Florida, and during the summer we have daily storms where the power continually drops, but usually for no more than a minute.  Until we have "graceful" shutdown in unRaid, I am more or less looking for prevention of the the glitches... Not ideal, but better than I have now.

 

As far as non-graceful shutdown (which is what happens now with glitches), I have not lost any data... but unRaid does a 8 hour parity check when I reboot, which heats up all my drives, etc... 

 

My hope is that as long as no writing is taking place during a non-graceful shutdown (if for instance an outage lasts for more than the battery capacity), then data will not be corrupted.