UPS

[Ngjtt]

I just experienced a hard power outage and now my freenas system will not boot with the disks pluged in. I believe the outage destroyed one of the drives. This is now the second time this has happend to me so I am thinking of buying a UPS. I have no experience whatsoever with this so I was hoping to get some support from the community. My freenas is a homebuild system with 5 (in the future 8) wd green hard drives. I only need the ups to keep the power on long enough to safely shutdown the system if the power goes out. please give me some advice on what I should buy and were I can buy it

 

[DJ9]

I'd go with APC or Eaton. Newegg sells both.

 

[JohnK]

I just experienced a hard power outage and now my freenas system will not boot with the disks pluged in. I believe the outage destroyed one of the drives. This is now the second time this has happend to me so I am thinking of buying a UPS. I have no experience whatsoever with this so I was hoping to get some support from the community. My freenas is a homebuild system with 5 (in the future 8) wd green hard drives. I only need the ups to keep the power on long enough to safely shutdown the system if the power goes out. please give me some advice on what I should buy and were I can buy it

UPS and Freenas is probably the worst documented area imaginable.

After spending about a week and reading everything I could find about Pure Sine Wave and some of the horrors of not having it, I went with a APC SMT750 with AP9630 for my two NAS servers, router and main switch. This is probably an overkill and I should be OK for that power failure, something we seldom have up here in the North East. Anyway, after a few more weeks I still have not been able to successfully configure this unit to communicate with my NAS server. I have added the management card hoping that is would make life easier and it probably would if I can get myself to do the configuration from my wife's windows pc. I just hate windows. I have not given up though and will post a how-to once I get this to work.

As far as buying a APC, I found Amazon to be the cheapest by far for a Smart model (in the USA).

Another question I could not find an answer for is can I hook the APC up to my generator. I have a Generac xp8000 that feeds most of my house. Of course since I have bought it power has been up 100%. Anyway, I have read that you can and you cannot. It feels like the UPS distributors conspires to keep the general uneducated public uneducated...

 

[Ngjtt]

I'd go with APC or Eaton. Newegg sells both.

Do you have any arguments why to buy from these brands? In JohnK comment, he says he could not get the APC up and running.

 

[Ngjtt]

Also, can anyone give me any advice as to how much VA my UPS should have?

 

[JohnK]

Do you have any arguments why to buy from these brands? In JohnK comment, he says he could not get the APC up and running.

I will admit that my biggest problem is probably user error/knowledge as I also have not spent enough time reading the manual. My biggest concern was power failure not so much graceful shut down as I'm at home and can do it manually in the short run.
I will also add that if I'm buying another UPS it will be an APC again for the simple reason that I have been in and out of data centres for the past 20 years and guess what brand of UPS do you see in most of them?

I also found this review on Amazon to be useful. (second one with comparisons)

 

[Dusan]

When selecting the UPS check the NUT compatibility list: http://www.networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html (FreeNAS uses NUT to communicate with the UPS). (Eaton is the main supporter of NUT, so their devices have a very good support.)

 

[JohnK]

When selecting the UPS check the NUT compatibility list: http://www.networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html (FreeNAS uses NUT to communicate with the UPS). (Eaton is the main supporter of NUT, so their devices have a very good support.)

When I selected APC, I knew ppl complained by the lack of Linux support and also their limited NUT compatibility (little better with AP9630 management card). Still for a home user my needs are rather simple.

I did look at Eaton, but when throwing Pure Sine Wave into the mix they become really expensive. I know the whole PSW thing is probably not that important but I didn't want to take changes just to save a hundred bucks.

Anyway, I stopped the procrastination and tried configuring NUT again using the supplied USB cable and it seems to be running fine. I tried the USB before and if kept throwing disconnection errors in the log. I made a little time to actually read the errors :) and found that I had to change my usb port number. Now it is fine and I might even pull the plug at some time to test it...

I added the management card because from what I can pick up from the manual is that you need that to manage more than one server. This is where things become a little more tricky, but I will make some time over the holiday season to sort it out. I am attempting to gracefully shut down two servers with one UPS... Felt like a reasonably simple thing to do and probably is if I installed Powerchute on windows...

 

[no_connection]

I have two Powerware 9120 (now Eaton) UPS running ESXi and FreeNAS. I get around 40min but batteries are probably 5+ years by now. Great for pulling the plug during a thunderstorm. Not really needed otherwise as power almost never gos out here.
They are set to "high efficiency" which is the same as offline UPS. You could use them online meaning constant power though the inverter. 3% THD rating for the generated sinewave if I remember the spec sheet.

I have also used APC SmartUPS 1000 but two of them had a cell short in one battery, meaning it would charge the crap out of the battery(full charge current) with no detection until it got so hot that it started to loose connection to the battery altogether(according to log), until it cooled down enough to keep charging meaning more heat. You could barely touch it. The Qnap connected to one of them had no idea something was wrong (connected through USB). Good thing I noticed it beeping and felt the heat(in a server room), made me check the one at home that just started the same thing but didn't have time to get too hot.

The Powerware is a lot more intelligent, noisy fan though.

Depending on PSU you could feed it HVDC as it rectifies mains to DC internally anyway. Still you have to know what your doing at that point.
One data company did that for their servers and used a bunch of batteries in series to get ~330V DC (I assume 24 batteries).

 

[DJ9]

I'm currently using APC, which is a older unit that I've had for around 8 years. I replaced the battery 2 years ago, and I figure next year I'll replace it with something new.

I'll be going with Eaton for a replacement.

 

[Sir.Robin]

I am using an old Eaton thang. Works fine with FreeNAS. However it's getting a bit old so i am in the process of buying new.

APC is a well known brand. But so are Eaton. Cyberpower is not (at least not here) well known... but i have a reason to beleive it is produced by Eaton?

Anyway, Cyberpower has a Linux based client with web interface, allowing you to manage and configure your UPS to work with vSphere.

Dunno how it interacts with FreeNAS directly, but for those of us running FreeNAS as a VM on vSphere this is great news and i am getting one :)

 

[Knowltey]

I just experienced a hard power outage and now my freenas system will not boot with the disks pluged in. I believe the outage destroyed one of the drives. This is now the second time this has happend to me so I am thinking of buying a UPS. I have no experience whatsoever with this so I was hoping to get some support from the community. My freenas is a homebuild system with 5 (in the future 8) wd green hard drives. I only need the ups to keep the power on long enough to safely shutdown the system if the power goes out. please give me some advice on what I should buy and were I can buy it

It may just be the USB drive that got corrupted, have you tried making a new boot USB and booting in? When I hard shutdown mine once it was just a simple case of making a new USB.

 

[Starpulkka]

Happy puppy APC user here, got five smartups models, one is on offsite backup place. Newer heard of trontech psu?

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

I have an apc back-ups 350. Dead simple to setup and works very well. Highly recommended.

 

[HolyK]

I have "Eaton Ellipse ECO 800USB, 800VA" and its working flawlessly. Time to time i receive email with "COMMBAD - eatonups" and when i check console i have just a message that system loss communication with UPS and in the same second (on in the next one) another message that everything is fine. Automatic shutdown based on time/battery state is working just fine. I have Supermicro MB, i3 CPU, 6x WD green + 2x WD red. Actually i did not tested for how long the UPS will hold the NAS since it depends on the actual load. I have timer set for 1minute and if power will not jump up back in that time, system will shut down.

 

[Dusan]

I have "Eaton Ellipse ECO 800USB, 800VA" and its working flawlessly. Time to time i receive email with "COMMBAD - eatonups" and when i check console i have just a message that system loss communication with UPS and in the same second (on in the next one) another message that everything is fine.

Interesting. I have Eaton Ellipse ECO 650 and I also saw the random brief USB disconnects (about once per week). I increased the COMMBAD timer in upssched.conf to suppress the emails. However, I just checked dmesg and there are no UPS USB messages since last reboot (about a month ago), so maybe it stopped somehow....

 

[HolyK]

Thank you for the tip, i'll also try to change that timer.