[mythtv-users] Re: Quiet Power Supplies/Quiet PC's

[Ray Olszewski]

At 09:07 PM 7/9/2003 -0400, Mark wrote:
>When I made that statement, failure implied a failing system.  While the 
>cheap power supply keeps
>producing power, it's simply not stable.  Wierd crashes become common, 
>even in Linux.  Replace power
>supply, problems go away.  Seen it way too many times.  I've got a stack 
>of power supplies in my
>cabinet that still power up, but aren't stable.  My good power supplies 
>don't do that.  I'm sorry your
>expensive 1U supplies died, but it's not been my experience.  YMMV.

As you say, "[M]MMV". That's very different from "Cheap power supplies 
ALWAYS die after about a year or two". I don't doubt your personal 
experience, only the generalization you make from it.

And surely "die" means something more drastic than "still power up, but 
aren't stable", at least the way I usually use words.

But my real interest in responding is to explore the details of your actual 
experience a bit more, now that I understand a little more about what you 
are really observing. I too have had what I would call stability problems 
(most commonly spontaneous reboots) with some of my cheap power supplies. 
Replacing the power supply always (actually only 2 or 3 instances over the 
last 5 years) fixed it.

But I always replaced the "unstable" power supply with another cheap one 
that had higher wattage. So I inferred from this that what I was actually 
seeing was transient power demands that exceeded the capacity of the P/S, 
rather than a "cheapness" problem per se (except that higher wattage power 
supplies generally cost more).

Does this sort of pattern at all match your actual observations (as 
distinct from your interpretation of them)? My impression is that people, 
me included, tend to underestimate *transient* demands on power supplies 
very often, though they (we) usually get the steady-state requirements 
about right.

>Ray Olszewski wrote:
>
>>At 02:57 PM 7/9/2003 -0400, Shirley, Mark R wrote:
>>
>>>Cheap power supplies ALWAYS die after about a year or two.
>>>I will never go back to cheap PSU's.  Pay $15-20, get one year.
>>>Pay $40 or more, get 5-6 years.

[old stuff deleted]