Power outage: effect on hard drive?

[marklbucla]

Suppose you have a power outage while using a computer. What can this do to a secondary hard drive (and its data) that is not being used? What if you are doing something like viewing pictures/movies and the power drops?

Thinking about getting a UPS...

[sargenv]

it's not the computer getting it's power cut that I worry about, it's the power spikes that happen as the power is being cycled through the grid a couple times as the grid tries to re-route and recover from the sudden power drop. THAT is generally what causes issues usually in the power supply and motherboard..

UPS's are great.. they clean up the power coming in and prevent that nasty voltage/amp spike that running on grid power can/does happen sometimes.. It it easier to replace the UPS than the much more expensive computer..

[frankDmole]

You are safe as long as you are not editing, and have not saved.

The problem comes when the power is restored, it usually does not come back gracefully, and if your computer is setup to auto start when power is applied you can loose your data and or your power supply.

A power strip with surge protector for sure and a UPS for extra protection.

[winnre]

I have had power go out right when my drive was writing to the FAT and I lost everything. Had to do a recovery that took hours. That was very unusual, it had to hit right at that exact moment and it was luck of the draw. Since then I got cheap UPS that is better than nothing.

[Coded-Dude]

Most all hardware failures are due to power cycling the system(whether planned or unplanned).

[Merc1138]

A UPS that can protect against power failures can be had for <$50. Just plug only the computer itself(not monitors, printers, etc.) into the thing along with the USB connection. You'll only have a couple minutes of power, but it'll be enough to shut your computer down properly. There's just no excuse not to have one.

If you have crappy power(brownouts, minor surges, and just dirty power in general), you may want to consider spending more on a line conditioning UPS(it's the reason one UPS might cost $100, and another costs $300), but that's not necessary to protect against a simple power loss.

[dem0critus]

Most all hardware failures are due to power cycling the system(whether planned or unplanned).

This. It's never good to "pull the plug" or have the plug pulled for any reason, but if it's not a regular thing I honestly wouldn't worry about it too much depending on how old the drive is, and how important that data on it is. Battery backup is always a good choice.

I'll admit I'm guilty of gross negligence on this lol. I've seen it take years for a good drive to go bad even being badly abused.

Another thing is the quality of your power supply. Most common burn-out in my exp. A crap ps/u will deliver a surge to the motherboard and other parts, when a good one on the other hand may not.

[IntoForever]

What I've heard was that in a power outage the read/write arms would drop onto spinning platters. I've never had a problem though and the place I lived at in 2000 was always popping breakers so maybe it was FUD. When it's time for my annual HD replacement I'm switching to Solid State HD's (no moving parts). Above advice is great, surge strip with a battery back-up.

[JDay]

Nothing should happen to the drive from a power outage if no write operations were pending. You can have loss of data if there was unwritten data in the write buffer when the power goes out.

What I've heard was that in a power outage the read/write arms would drop onto spinning platters. I've never had a problem though and the place I lived at in 2000 was always popping breakers so maybe it was FUD. When it's time for my annual HD replacement I'm switching to Solid State HD's (no moving parts). Above advice is great, surge strip with a battery back-up.

Possibly true with very old drives but modern drives park the heads when there is power loss. And a surge strip is useless. Not to mention if you have a battery backup it doubles as one. You want to go with a pure sine wave UPS though so that you get filtered power, power strips are not filtered which is why they are pretty useless.