Hi Chaps,

Sick of problems caused when my local electricity substation goes belly up all too often.
Anyone recommend a good, cheap UPS for my 475 please?

Thanks,
Mike.

I have used APC and Cyberpower. What you need to look for is a UPS with a communications port so you can connect it to a USB Port on your server. Then you just need to install the software and set it up to instruct the server to shut down after a period of time if the power has not been restored. I use the 80% rule in that I would allow my servers to run 20% of the battery capacity and then shut the server down.

The goal here is to just keep the server running during a power failure and then have the server shut down in a controlled manor. APC has their PowerChute Personal Edition which does have a version for WHS. To install the software you would have to make an RDP Connection to the server and then the easiest way to get the software on it would be to download it from APC and run the install from the server itself.

There is also an ADD-ON for WHS called I belive GRID Juntion which you can install and have it do the same thing so you have a choice. CyberPower also has software for their devices which I am running on one of my EX470's at work. On a small server like the EX470 I use a 425va which is affordable and does the job. If you have multiple enclosures and a monitor you may want something bigger. Often the manufactureres will give you an idea of how long a device will keep things under power based on various loads.

Just keep one thing in mind and that is the batteries inside these units will need to be replaced from time to time because over time the battery performance degrades. I believe the typical replacement time is 3 yrs but I tend to change mine every 1-2 years but for some devices the batteries actually cost almost as much as the device itself and when I run into that situation I just replace the entire device and repurpose the device for running low power lighting until it totally fails.

One thing you do need to know is these devices have alarms so they beep when there is a power failure but the alarms can be silenced with the device software. This is something I have to do because in my house the are UPS's everywhere and its like a horrible symphany when the go off.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Thanks Highlander.
Much obliged.
Mike.