Honestly, at 8 years, I'd be leaning towards dirty power on the user's end. For a company like BackBlaze, I'd assume a data center would have conditioned power. For someone at home running a NAS with the same drive connected straight to mains, they may not receive the same life span for a drive from the same batch. Undervolting when the power dips is gnarly on equipment. It's amazing to me how the use of a UPS is not as ubiquitous at home.
> it’s amazing to me how the use of a UPS is not as ubiquitous at home
I live in the UK. I’ve had one power cut in the last… 14 years? Brown outs aren’t a thing. I’ve had more issues with my dog pulling out cables because she got stuck on them (once) than I have with any issues to my supply
why people continue to misunderstand this befuddles me. If you bought a budget PSU, then who knows what the voltages really are coming down the +3/+5v lines. You hope they are only +3/+5, but what happens when the power dips. Is the circuitry in the bargain priced PSU going to keep the voltages within tolerance, or do they even have the necessary caps in place to handle the slightest change in mains? we've seen way too meany tear downs to show that's not a reliable thing to bank your gear on.
> why people continue to misunderstand this befuddles me.
You might want to check whether your befuddlement is due to your own misunderstanding of the topic. How many switching regulators have you built? We aren't living in fixed AC transformer days anymore, even the shittiest PSU won't behave like you're making it out. The legally required PFC will already prevent it just by itself, before the main 400V DC/DC step-down even gets its hands on the power. And why are you even mentioning 3V/5V? Those rails only exist for compatibility, modern systems run almost entirely off the 12V rails; even SATA power connectors got their 3.3V (it's not 3V btw) pins spec'd away to reserved by now.
> It's amazing to me how the use of a UPS is not as ubiquitous at home.
Most users don't see enough failures that they can attribute to bad power to justify the cost in their mind. Furthermore, USPes are extremely expensive per unit of energy storage, so the more obviously useful use case (of not having your gaming session interrupted by a power outage) simply isn't there.
I work there. Can't go into much detail, but we have absolutely had various adventures with power and cooling that were entirely out of our control. There was even an "unmooring" event that nearly gave us a collective heart attack, which I'll leave you to guess at :)
Living in Sweden, realized last year that I hadn't replaced my homeserver/NAS in a long time, still haven't had time to replace it and the 2 drives (WD RED) are now approaching 10 years of power on time without any smart problems so far.
UPSes are a PITA. I have frequent enough outages that I use them on all of my desktops, and they need a new battery every couple years, and now I'm reaching the point where the whole thing needs replacement.
When they fail, they turn short dips, which a power supply might have been able to ride through into an instant failure, and they make terrible beeping at the same time. At least the models I have do their test with the protected load, so if you test regularly, it fails by having an unscheduled shutdown, so that's not great either. And there's not many vendors and my vendor is starting to push dumb cloud shit. Ugh.
Sounds like you have some APS model. I had those issues, and switched to Cyberpower. The alarm can be muted and the battery lasts for many years.
A UPS is a must for me. When I lived in the midwest, a lightening strike near me fried all my equipment, including the phones. I now live in Florida and summer outages and dips (brownouts) are frequent.
I've got Cyberpowers actually. The alarm can be muted, but it doesn't stay muted. Especially when the battery (or ups circuitry) is worn out so a power dip turns into infinite beeping. But also if the computer is turned off.
Many years ago I had the same thing happen - actually came in the phone line, fried my modem and everything connected to the motherboard. More recently I had lightning strike a security camera - took out everything connected to the same network switch, plus everything connected to the two network switches one hop away. Also lit up my office with a shower of sparks. Lightning is no joke.
