I hate cheap uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). I live in a small village in Germany where at times the power can be a bit unreliable. So to counter this I have a number of UPSs in the house from Trust and APC. I must admit that I only bought the Trust UPS because they are cheap, however you get what you pay for. Do the UPS from Trust work? Yes they do however they have some issues that I find problematic.
I have two power strips on my server rack with each power strip attached to its own UPS. This is done to distribute the load and maximize system uptime in case of a power outage. However, as you can see in the photo I only have a switch and two Atom servers. The switch and the servers are on separate power strips additionally my desktop is on the power strip with the switch. Now with this in mind, before I had the APC UPS I had two Trust UPSs. This leads to the main issue I had with the Trust UPSs.
The Trust UPS on power failure will automatically shut themselves off if they detect a load of less than 75 watts. This was a major issue for me as my Atom servers together only used about 50 watts of power. This meant that every time I had a power outage the Trust UPS would just shut off bringing down my windows server and VoIP server hard. I only discovered this was the issue after doing a lot of research on the internet as to why this relatively new UPS was not working.
The second problem I have with the Trust UPS is the fact that the battery is not easily replaceable. To replace the battery in this UPS you have to take it almost completely apart. However for the price that you pay for the UPS it is almost more practical to buy a whole new UPS when the batteries die in the one you have. This is in contrast to my new APC UPS which has a user replaceable battery. You can replace the battery in the APC ups in about two minutes or less. Where as in the Trust UPS it would take about an hour if you know what you are doing.
Some other things I like about my APC UPS is the fact that through APCs PowerChute software you can program the minimum load before shutoff. This allowed me to adjust the minimum load to be less than one operational server (less than 20 watts), thereby ensuring that my servers would remain operational in the event of a power outage. I also like the front panel display on the APC UPS which allows me to see things like the current load on the UPS and estimated runtime in case of power failure.
Overall I am happy whit the new APC UPS, but like I said before, you get what you pay for. The APC UPS I bought on AMAZON.DE for 293.99 euro. The Trust UPS I also got on AMAZON.DE for 131.57 euro. As you can see, you could buy two of the Trust UPS for the price of one of the APCs. There is nothing wrong with the UPSs from Trust, they work well but I would not use them for anything I would consider mission critical. Secondly the feature set on the APC blows away the Trust UPSs. However this is to be expected considering the price difference.
