Following a lot of mid-pandemic work on my unRAID towers, I’ve reached a point where I’m pretty comfortable I’ve done all I can do to ensure against catastrophic failure: finally converted all my ReiserFS drives to XFS, got everything protected by dual parity, resolved a bunch of temperature issues.

 

One thing bugs me, though: two of these 21-drive towers (and one 13-drive tower) are about a decade (and about 7 years) old, and I keep reading snippets of “well, unless your PSU fails and takes out everything at once” in unrelated threads that, combined with the “capacity reduces by 10% or so yearly up to a point” adage, has me thinking I may be dancing on thin ice with all three of these PSUs currently.

 

What gives me pause on replacing all three (or at least the pair of ~decade old ones) immediately is the weird use case of UnRAID (or maybe just mine specifically). All three of these towers were designed for their UnRAID WORM purpose, and none of their parts had any previous life. Am I being extremely paranoid, or is replacement at this point a prudent idea?
 

There have definitely been times (months, even years) where one tower or the other has not been powered on at all, or has seen extremely minimal use (90% idle time when powered on). Could these use situations mitigate the normal “danger zone” timeline on replacing a PSU?

 

…or not enough to ease larger concerns on something like built-up fan dust congealing and overheating the PSU regardless of how long it’s actually been in operation (and at what level of effort)?

 

Any guidance on how concerned I should be (and how swiftly I should replace what I have) would be greatly appreciated!

 

PSU/System Age Specifics (all drives 3.5” between 5700-7200):

 

The 2011 21-disk tower is running on a Corsair Enthusiast Series TX650 ATX12V/EPS12V 80 Plus Bronze, purchased in 2011

 

The 2012 21-disk tower is running on a Corsair Enthusiast Series TX650 ATX12V/EPS12V 80 Plus Bronze, purchased in 2012

 

The 2015 13-disk tower is running on a Corsair RM Series 650 Watt ATX/EPS 80PLUS Gold-Certified Power Supply - CP-9020054-NA RM650, purchased in 2015

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by wheel
Added details

9 hours ago, wheel said:

Am I being extremely paranoid, or is replacement at this point a prudent idea?

It might be a prudent idea.

 

But it's unlikely that any of your old PSU's will fail within the next few years considering their operational loads.

And even less likely that they will damage other components if the failure does happen.

You might consider opening them up to dust off the internals while checking for bulged capacitors.

-