Found out my shop's main server was running on a 10-year-old power supply this whole time

I was tracing a random shutdown issue on our file server last Tuesday and popped the cover off. The PSU was rated for 450 watts, but the system was pulling 480 at peak. No wonder it kept crashing. Anyone else ever find a ticking time bomb like that in a machine you trusted?

3 comments

3 Comments

benwilliams28d ago

Man, that is a disaster waiting to happen. A buddy of mine had something similar happen with his home media server a couple years back. He thought it was a bad hard drive causing the random restarts, but turns out the power supply was this old no-name unit that was barely putting out 350 watts under a real load. It actually ended up cooking itself one night and took the motherboard with it when it finally went. I don't think he ever got all his movie files back from that.

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hall.alex28d ago

Man, that is rough. Did your buddy ever figure out if the PSU was actually a fake or just a super cheap model from a no-name brand? I ask because I've seen those "500 watt" units on Amazon that are basically ticking time bombs with those little rattly fans. It makes you wonder why people don't just spend the extra 30 bucks on a decent Corsair or EVGA unit when they're building a server full of hard drives. Or was he just trying to save every penny and didn't think it would matter? Sounds like a hard lesson learned the worst way possible.

karenhenderson15d ago

Oh man that totally changed my mind about power supplies. I used to be one of those people who thought "eh, a 50 dollar unit is probably fine for a media server, it's not like I'm gaming on it." I figured the PSU just needed to turn on and stay on, didn't think about the load from spinning up all those hard drives at once. But hearing about his motherboard getting fried along with the PSU really hits home. I've got three drives in my own setup and now I'm kind of paranoid about that old Thermaltake I've been running for years. Definitely going to swap it out for a quality unit before I lose all my concert recordings and family photos.