Catastrophic disk failure, where was smartd?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 20:09:43 +1030,
  Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 07:47 -0800, dwight at supercomputer.org wrote:
> > I can't tell you how many UPS's I've seen that are supposedly good, 
> > but have 5+ year old batteries in them. 
> 
> How many let you hot swap a battery?  Surely that's a requirement, to be
> able to change an aging component, without having to power down the
> computer that it's supply.  It is supposed to be an *uninterrupted*
> power supply.

That is not its purpose. It is to provide you with time to cleanly shut
down the system to avoid damage. If you want constant uptime you need
a backup power source as well. At that point you are probably going to be
buying something other than a consumer UPS which could potentially have
a way to swap batteries under load.

> But out of the small number of consumer aimed UPSs that I've actually
> been able to see, they're virtually a sealed box.

That's because for consumers, there isn't any point to having that feature.
They don't need 100% uptime, they just need some time to clean up what
they are doing before the power fails. (And a UPS will help protect the
power supply from crappy power and possibly lengthen its life.)