noahw53•6d agoProlific Poster

Fixed a server that kept crashing after a power surge last Tuesday

I was at a small medical office downtown Houston last week. Their main server kept rebooting after a storm knocked power out for a second. I tried swapping the PSU first, still crashed. Turns out the surge got through the UPS and fried the RAM sticks. Pulled two bad sticks out, put in spares from my van, and it booted right up. Client said they'd been dealing with this for three days before calling me. Charged them $200 for a job that took 45 minutes once I found the problem. Anyone else run into surge damage that bypasses a good UPS?

2 comments

2 Comments

betty_fisher56d ago

I had a similar thing happen last month with a dental practice's server. The UPS was reporting clean power but the surge had actually gone through the ground line, not the hot wire. Fried the motherboard's SATA controller, not the RAM. Had to replace the whole board. Those little surges are sneaky, they find the path of least resistance through the grounding system even if the voltage spike is small.

perez.cole6d ago

That's a really good point about the ground line being the sneaky path. I read somewhere that a lot of surge protectors don't do much to protect against that kind of surge through the ground, they just check the hot and neutral. It makes you wonder how many people have lost hardware to something their UPS said was fine.