I have had a lot of power outages and some brownouts lately, so I want to get a UPS to protect my Synology NAS. Many in the past have pointed to APC as the standard, but looking at the reviews of their recent products is scary as hell (catastrophic failure within the first year resulting in ruined equipment, smoke, and the smell of burning plastic). I know social reviews can amplify anecdotal experiences in a misleading way, but color me concerned.
Right not I am planning to use this just for the NAS (four drives), a modem, and a router, but I suppose I may want to add more in the future. I figure a 1000 VA or 1500 VA UPS would be more than enough.
As usual there is a huge price difference between consumer grade and the pro stuff. I am hoping to get away with a consumer grade UPS, but if you think this is a bad idea, let me know.
I have about 3 APCs here. All work great. I have used APC for 20 years, never had issues. Remember to replace the battery every 5 years or so when you get one. Although, sometimes it’s cheaper to buy a new one.
What Stusser said. I have to replace work UPSs from very small to very large for the organization I work for. I also have two UPSs at the house, one for my PC/laptop, and one for the TV/receiver/etc.
Small UPS units these days are nearly at commodity pricing. Some are even built as to not make battery changeout easy, forcing you to just buy a new unit completely. Nothing wrong with that, just know what you’re getting into.
Cyberpower is our bang-for-the-buck vendor these days. APC is the tried and true but more expensive option. If you are storing files and work items at home with no backup, (get a backup system) but also look at spending a little more for time to get things shut down, and the auto-shutdown software/connection to do so. If you just need a surge protector and power isolation with a short battery time, get a cheap unit, they will all do that.
I do have a Costco membership. That deal Stusser linked to looks good, but I am leaning towards a unit with a little more capacity, although I acknowledge that is probably overkill for my present needs.
Make sure you evaluate the “capacity” both in maximum output (Watts/VA) and in runtime at expected load, so you don’t end up buying something which can power everything you need but only for a minute.
Are people happy with the cyberpower software? It seems like gracefully shutting down your system when the system is unattended would be pretty important.
I should definitely pick one of these up - we had a wave of brownouts a few days ago when a storm went through and my PC got pretty fucked. I wound up booting off a USB drive and running checkdisk and the like, and spent hours plugging/unplugging drives, and eventually everything got recovered, but I thought perhaps my motherboard I/O or SATA drives were trashed by 3 quick brownouts followed by me rapidly slamming the poweroff button.
This is what pushed me to buy one. I was living in Atlanta at the time and the power would flicker pretty frequently. Not enough to cause damage, but enough to hard shut down my PC, which I knew would be a bad thing if it kept happening.
No problems with a UPC. If the power goes down while the PC is asleep and I’m not around, the APC software automatically shuts the PC down before losing power.
