General > General Technical Chat
Why aren't computers designed to handle power failure?
bd139:
Samsung Pro 2.5" SATA units are fine as well. I found that the Samsung Pro M2 ones don't have hold up capacitors though as they are usually shoved in laptops. Figured to hell with it when I built my desktop and stuffed a Samsung Evo in it. :-//
HPE and Intel ones do.
daqq:
--- Quote ---I've been thinking of attaching my PC into one of those sine wave house inverters which use 150aH (I've seen their batteries lasting more than 5 years)
--- End quote ---
Looking at the modern computer PSU, shouldn't they be able to run off of higher voltage DC? The input is rectified anyway.
pepelevamp:
** computer science guy joins the chat
the problem is that computers in principal should be able to turn off in the blink of an eye without any problem. yet we can't design general purpose computers without being drunk & smoking crack.
if you truly think about it - aside from say saving an open document - why would you really even need to do anything when you yank the power on a computer?
now i know you're all gonna bite at me saying oh gee pepe, filesystems need to be flushed to disk oh waa. to that i say - stop cheating to get more performance with ya wee DRAM memory caches.
anywhere that has a DRAM cache such as a disk must hold enough local power in a local supercap to flush it to disk.
the modern day CPU is full of lies & tricks to get more performance by cheating. writing to local caches etc. its all a big scam. pipe-lining, speculative execution, asynchronous volatile buffers - its all stuff that takes away your ability to deterministically run operations in sequence - all just so you can get more overall throughput. it makes it damn near impossible to yank out your power cable and plug it back in again & resume at point T: Your computer never has one point in time that its working at. Its scattered.
so I propose this:
either give every damn thing a supercap or stop lying to everybody & make honest computers.
it all falls apart anyway. look at speculative execution. the latest security screwup is so bad the only solution is to lock the entire memory bus & tank the system's performance by 97%.
engrguy42:
I'm kinda scratching my head here. While I realize this is probably a fun tech topic for some with nothing better to do, for the average home desktop user the stuff they're working on are, well, less than critical. You need a UPS so you don't lose your place in your favorite video game? Or that youtube video you were watching of a cat playing piano? Let's be real here.
Also, W10 has a (sometimes annoying) feature where if it's shut off suddenly it remembers what you were working on and re-starts it all, where you left off, the next time you boot your computer. Add to that the fact that, for many/most here in the US, loss of power is a fairly rare occurrence. I generally go many months without an interruption. Yeah, in storm/hurricane season you might more, but it depends on where you live.
Though I'm sure we'll hear from those "yeah, but..."'s who lost their power yesterday.... :D
Businesses are a different thing entirely, and they employ serious solutions as needed. And for home users, I recall my brief journey with a UPS many years ago was pretty much a waste, since it only provides enough power so you can take a few minutes to finish everything and shut it down. A lot of money for something like that...
And of course the "yeah, but..."'s will have to mention how you can get a bigger one to last longer.
pepelevamp:
yeah but computers are general purpose & theres little reason to yield to making computers unsafe to do work on, especially in the avenue of 'ya not doing anything important'. thats an uphill battle to prove.
computers simply should not require any significant time to safely shut down. the blame for this goes directly to asynchronous instruction caches, multiple cores, pipelining, speculative execution and so-on.
windows & applications have never been able to safely restore up to where they were. same with the mac. they dont actually do that. its just an attempt to do something similar enough in appearance to make you think you're resuming. ya not.
OP is right more than he even realizes:
computers are not designed to safely handle power failure. UPS externally or even an internal power buffer is still not making a computer designed to handle power failure - you're just eliminating or delaying the power failure.
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