UPS for unraid


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5 minutes ago, 3560freak said:

Looking to purchase an APC 1500VA Back-UPS Pro Sinewave (BR1500MS) for my HP Microserver Gen 8.  I know that this is overkill for a server of this size, but hoping to avoid buying another UPS too soon in the future.  Any thoughts on this model for this server and compatibility with UnRaid 6?  Thanks for any suggestions.

 

 

I would suggest that you check the price of the replacement batteries before you purchase this large a UPS simply because you are trying to 'future' proof.  Most UPs batteries are good to four to five years...

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4 hours ago, 3560freak said:

Looking to purchase an APC 1500VA Back-UPS Pro Sinewave (BR1500MS) for my HP Microserver Gen 8.  I know that this is overkill for a server of this size, but hoping to avoid buying another UPS too soon in the future.  Any thoughts on this model for this server and compatibility with UnRaid 6?  Thanks for any suggestions.

 

That's an excellent unit -- not "overkill" at all.   Plenty of capacity, pure sinewave output so you don't have to worry about any electrical issues for systems that are overly sensitive to distorted waveforms, etc.    You may NEVER need to buy a replacement ... just get fresh batteries ever 3-5 years (~ $35 for a pair of the user replaceable batteries).

 

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If you're price sensitive, you may want to look at the CyberPower sinewave units -- they are often available for a few $$ less than APC.    APC is the "gold standard" for UPS units, however, so if the difference is modest I'd go with them.    I have several units from both makers, and they're all very reliable.   I do, however, only buy their better sine wave units and none of the less expensive "simulated sine wave" models.    No matter what you buy, be CERTAIN you have AVR  (ALL of the sine wave units and most of the other units will have this -- only the very inexpensive models omit this feature).

 

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Looking for a UPS unit. I am not an expert on this subject.

 

Mi home server is modest. Build to be noiseless and low consumption:

2x2TB disks,

500 GB Samsung SSD

Intel G4600

8GB RAM ddr4

ASRock B250M Pro4

nvidia gt 710

Seasonic Platinum Fanless 400W 80 Plus Platinum

 

The UPS will be connected to a Asus Router too.

 

I does not need high availability or similar, but for a product like this I prefer buy a quality one.

I also prefer a unit with a display. Better for newbies.

 

I can get a "Lenovo UPS Series: IBM T1.5kVA Tower UPS Model 55952KX" (second hand but sealed) for 160 euros. I see it on shops for +500 euros.

Is it overkill?

The problem? I can not found replacement batteries for it. I am not sure if searching correctly for it.

Are the batteries for this systems standard or specific to the brand/model?

 

I am following:

- "APC Back UPS Pro BR900G-GR SAI 900VA" for ~210 euros too.

- Salicru SPS.2000.SOHO+  (2000VA, 3 x Schuko) for about 150 euros.

If new I will buy it in Spain  (amazon.es or pccomponentes)

 

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

 

 

 

Edited by pcaro
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30 minutes ago, pcaro said:

The problem? I can not found replacement batteries for it. I am not sure if searching correctly for it.

Are the batteries for this systems standard or specific to the brand/model?

Most UPS's use bog standard sealed lead acid batteries, but many try to tape them together, and / or use special looking wiring harnesses taped or glued to the batteries to make them look like something special or proprietary.

 

You may not be able to find out without disassembling that specific model and looking for yourself, but from looking at the online manual, it appears to be either 2 or 3 of a standard PS-1290 F2 battery taped together in a block.

 

BTW, that looks like a VERY nice unit, don't know if it's NUT compatible, but probably is.

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On 4/30/2017 at 5:47 PM, SSD said:

I understand that BTRFS is not as good as other FS with power cuts.

Not sure I agree. I use BTRFS in some embedded equipment. Before going ahead with it, a test setup did regularly break the power for more than 10k times while the device did run a program that was mass-writing to the file system. No broken file system resulted from the tests.


The whole idea with CoW (Copy on Write) file systems is that you don't need a journal. All changes are written to unused sectors and you commit the changes by switching to a new storage tree that includes the new writes. If that last write doesn't happen, then the storage tree will continue to point to the original data. It's just that BTRFS has had a rather large number of bugs, so you need a very recent kernel (or a kernel with the fixes back-ported) to get all the fixes or you'll quickly get file system corruption. For CoW to work, it's important that the final write that switches to the new tree really happens last - if any code block fails to honor the barrier requirements then you can expect serious file system corruption.

 

Alas, BTRFS still has lots of work to do before they have managed to also get the RAID code working properly, when it isn't enough with single-disk barrier requirements.

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9 hours ago, jonathanm said:

Most UPS's use bog standard sealed lead acid batteries, but many try to tape them together, and / or use special looking wiring harnesses taped or glued to the batteries to make them look like something special or proprietary.

 

You may not be able to find out without disassembling that specific model and looking for yourself, but from looking at the online manual, it appears to be either 2 or 3 of a standard PS-1290 F2 battery taped together in a block.

 

BTW, that looks like a VERY nice unit, don't know if it's NUT compatible, but probably is.

 

Thanks for the reply. I will research about NUT support and go for the Lenovo UPS

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  • 1 month later...

I am looking to replace an older UPS unit that gave up the ghost this morning.  My unRAID server was connected to an APC Backups ES-725.  We had a big snowstorm last night and lost power.  I woke up to a chorus of beeping UPS units at 1:00am.  I was able to power down the unRAID server and shut off all the UPS units without issue. Other than the main unRAID server, no other computers were powered on.  However, when I powered on the APC ES-725 several hours later in order to restart the server, it screamed constantly like it had a bad battery (I just replaced it in December). After resetting it, I powered it back on and there were sparks, smoke and an acrid smell.  It's gone to the great beyond.

 

I have read through this thread and it appears the best UPS units have AVR and pure Sinewave support.  What do you think of this unit that has both?:

 

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16842301698

 

I will plug in the server, monitor, main router and two switches to the battery backup outlets. The server only has 4 8TB HDDs and two SSDs.  It draws about 95W at power up and less than 30W at idle according to my Kill-A-Watt.  Max power draw on the router is 40W and the two switches draw 12W each.  According to the APC sizing calculator, I should be OK with anything 850VA and up for a 10-minute run time on battery.

 

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  • 6 months later...

Well, after buying a CyperPower Value800EILCD a few years ago, I had my first power outage.  Only off for about 60 seconds, but whatever happened it killed the UPS and everything shut down straight away.  Checked fuses, but the UPS is dead.

 

I'm currently racking everything up - anybody know of any decent 19" UPS suitable for unRaid (that don't cost the earth)?  They all seem to be on the expensive side compared to the CyberPower bricks.  Failing that, I'll get another CyberPower one.

 

Or is there any mileage in getting a used one and replacing the batteries? (it sounds odd to me, but you never know)

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4 minutes ago, Cessquill said:

Well, after buying a CyperPower Value800EILCD a few years ago, I had my first power outage.  Only off for about 60 seconds, but whatever happened it killed the UPS and everything shut down straight away.  Checked fuses, but the UPS is dead.

 

Have you ever tested it?  (Easy way is to plug in a couple of hundred Watts of light bulbs and pull the plug and see how long it runs.)  You didn't say when you purchased the unit but I would suspect that the batteries have gone bad.  Two to five years seems to be a typical battery life and usage (Running on battery power)  does not seem to be a big factor.  

 

Personally, I try to prevent deep discharge of the batteries in the UPS that I have.  I start shutdown as soon as the power has been off for 30 seconds.  (Years of experience has show me that if it out this long, it will be out for far, far longer then the batteries will last in any UPS that I could afford!) 

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16 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

 

Have you ever tested it?  (Easy way is to plug in a couple of hundred Watts of light bulbs and pull the plug and see how long it runs.)  You didn't say when you purchased the unit but I would suspect that the batteries have gone bad.  Two to five years seems to be a typical battery life and usage (Running on battery power)  does not seem to be a big factor.  

 

Personally, I try to prevent deep discharge of the batteries in the UPS that I have.  I start shutdown as soon as the power has been off for 30 seconds.  (Years of experience has show me that if it out this long, it will be out for far, far longer then the batteries will last in any UPS that I could afford!) 

 

I did a brief test when I originally installed it (by plugging my server in and turning off the power).  To be honest, I've set it and forgotten about it since - it's under the stairs so it's entirely likely it could have been displaying a fault that I missed.  We're fortunate enough to have reliable power where I am, so it's never really been discharged.

 

I thought I got it a few years ago, and I've just found the invoice.  July '15, so a bit longer than that.  If the battery has worn out, would the unit be completely dead?  Either way, the manual states 3 years expected life, and I got 3 years and a month.

 

Can you change the batteries on these, or is it a new unit?

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Most of the time the battery is changeable.  (It would be a super cheap unit if it were not.) Depending on the power rating, the cost could be nominal as the size and Ampere-hour rating are fairly standard for the batteries used in most of the lower wattage/VA units.  Best thing to do to remove the battery, read the label and measure its size.  Look for one that is the same size, Ampere-hour rating and voltage (most are 12V).

 

By the way, it may have protected your server many times over the years.  We probably have a six-to-twelve outage that last less than thirty seconds (Power Company switching gear handling power surge due to lightening hits.) and one or two where the server has run on the battery during server shutdown where the power will be out for a couple of hours.  

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2 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

Most of the time the battery is changeable.  (It would be a super cheap unit if it were not.) Depending on the power rating, the cost could be nominal as the size and Ampere-hour rating are fairly standard for the batteries used in most of the lower wattage/VA units.  Best thing to do to remove the battery, read the label and measure its size.  Look for one that is the same size, Ampere-hour rating and voltage (most are 12V).

 

By the way, it may have protected your server many times over the years.  We probably have a six-to-twelve outage that last less than thirty seconds (Power Company switching gear handling power surge due to lightening hits.) and one or two where the server has run on the battery during server shutdown where the power will be out for a couple of hours.  

Thanks for that.  According to the CyberPower website, it's not changeable (although It probably is), and from the Value1200 up, it's a simpler process (unscrew front panel, remove battery cover, slide out battery).

 

Yes - I'm thankful for having it in the system, since it could have been a lot worse.  The whole town was out for a short while, and some places didn't open the next day as all freezers/refrigerators were knocked out.

 

Thanks for your help - I'll take a look at it this weekend, although might buy a second one anyway and relegate this to the desktop PC.

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Just now, Cessquill said:

Thanks for that.  According to the CyberPower website, it's not changeable (although It probably is), and from the Value1200 up, it's a simpler process (unscrew front panel, remove battery cover, slide out battery).

 

 

My guess would be that this is a larger capacity battery.  Some of these were fabricated by combining two smaller standard batteries together into a (apparently) single unit so be sure to have a really careful look at it.  (Doing it this way was cheaper that getting a non-standard designed and built in comparatively small numbers.) 

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6 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

 

My guess would be that this is a larger capacity battery.  Some of these were fabricated by combining two smaller standard batteries together into a (apparently) single unit so be sure to have a really careful look at it.  (Doing it this way was cheaper that getting a non-standard designed and built in comparatively small numbers.) 

Well, I had a spare five minutes, so I went at it with the screwdriver.  The battery in a CyberPower Value800EILCD is a Leoch DJW12-9.0 (12V9.0AH).

 

Replacements here cost about £20, so it's worth trying to see whether it'll come back from the dead.

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After looking at this thread a few days ago, I decided to replace the batteries on my ups that had been hidden away in the closet.  It's an old APC model i've had for quite some time.  As soon as I installed the batteries and plugged it in, the unit showed 100%.  I initially had planned on just plugging it in and letting it charge before turning it on.  So since the batteries were at 100%, I decided to connect things to it.  After looking at the load, 5-6 minutes seems very low.  Now it has me thinking that possibly one battery or both are bad.  Does this seem way off? 

TF2qJRc.png

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Depends on the battery capacity and the true percentage of charge that is on it.  I look at most of the numbers (concerning the state of the battery)  as SWAG's  (Stupid Wild A$$ Guess).  Plus, in many cases they really mean it when they say to charge the battery for 24 hours.  While the battery may have been charged to 100% at some time in the past, we have have no way of knowing when that past really was. As most of these batteries are made in China, it is probably (at least) six months ago as nobody is going to airship these batteries at the price they are asking for them. 

 

The best way to test to allow it to charge for 24 hours.  Shutdown your server down.  Now plug in a number in light bulbs to approximate the power load that the UPS unit will have to supply.  (Spin up all of the drives and look at the UPS load for a reasonable estimate) and then pull the power plug.  Take data points of time vs Runtime Left.  Then plot the data points.  

 

As I have always stressed to anyone who will listen, you should set the Time on Battery before Shutdown to some value like 30 seconds.  In the developed countries of the world, if the power is out longer than this, it will be out far, far longer than the batteries in these inexpensive UPS's can ever supply!  Plus, you want to  make sure that you will always have enough battery left to actually power the server when the battery is three years old.  

 

A second factor is the charging time of the battery is at least ten times longer that the discharge time.  IF you have a power outage and run the battery down to 40% of full charge and then shut the server down.  Lets assume that the power is out for two hours.  The power comes back on.  An hour, someone decides to restart the server.  Fifteen minutes later that power goes out again.  Now the UPS will not have enough charge for shutdown sequence before the battery is exhausted and you will have an unclean shutdown!  

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4 hours ago, Mikecdm said:

After looking at the load, 5-6 minutes seems very low

you just need to run UPS run-time battery calibration. it is recommended to run it one to two times in a year. with this procedure your UPS will learn about batteries and after that will show more correct run-time left. it's not recommended to run it more frequently cos of deep batteries discharge.   

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  • 1 year later...

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