2b- LARGE UPS because HDs are the components that have the higher power
consomption (a 700VA UPS gives me about 10-12 minutes on a machine
with a XP2200+, 1GB RAM and a 40GB HD, however this fall to......
less than 25 secondes with seven HDs ! all ATA),
I got my hands on a (free) 1400 VA APC rackmount UPS ; the batteries were
dead so I stuck two car batteries in. It can power my computer (Athlon 64,
7 drives) for more than 2 hours...
It looks ugly though. I wouldn't put this in a server rack, but for my
home PC it's perfect. It has saved my work many times...
Harddisks suck in about 15 watts each, but draw large current spikes on
seeking, so the VA rating of the UPS is important. I guess in your case,
the batteries have enough charge left; but the current capability of the
UPS is exceeded.
Some hardware ctrlrs are able to avoid the loss of a disk if you turn
to have some faulty sectors (by relocating internally them); software
RAID doesn't as sectors *must* be @ the same (linear) addresses.
Harddisks do transparent remapping now... linux soft raid can rewrite bad
sectors with good data and the disk will remap the faulty sector to a good
one.
