Somewhat OT - can underpowered power supplies damage a system?

Kwan Lowe kwan at digitalhermit.com
Wed Aug 18 22:07:15 UTC 2010


On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 12:08 PM, James Mckenzie
<jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Kwan Lowe <kwan at digitalhermit.com> wrote:
>>Sent: Aug 18, 2010 8:37 AM
>>To: Community support for Fedora users <users at lists.fedoraproject.org>
>>Subject: Re: Somewhat OT - can underpowered power supplies damage a system?
>>
>>On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 1:27 AM, Thomas Cameron

> I had a system saved by one of those bargain power supplies when the transformer on the pole had a primary-secondary short.  Almost killed the UPS, but the power supply transformer shorted out blowing the fuse in a most spectacular manner (the wire splattered on the glass, cracking it.)  When I took it to a local shop, in Korea, they plugged it in after replacing the fuse.  The fuse arced over...  I got a new supply out of the deal and they did not believe what happened to it.

Holy smokes!  :O
[snip]
>
> So, $30 PSU or untold $ worth of data?  I'll take the former.

There's no critical data on each machine, just some large image files
that could be recreated. The two drives were mirrored so if one failed
I could extract the images, replace the drives, then bring the system
back into the cluster. They were even network booted so even if a
meteor landed on that particular system, I could rebuild the image in
a matter of minutes.


More information about the users mailing list