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Author
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Topic: Doremi ShowVault Power Supplies
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Rick Cohen
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 102
From: Amherst, New York
Registered: Feb 2011
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posted 05-25-2017 07:46 PM
Central (GMT -6:00) (1:46 AM Local)
The ShowVault has a dual power supply. I recently had one start to go bad, and simply replaced them both just to be on the safe side. My question is, if one of the supplies is bad, is there an easy way to tell which power supply is the bad one? I was considering swapping one of the power supplies into another ShowVault, and observing to see if the problem migrated to the other ShowVault.
Before anyone asks, we are a drive-in, and only operate two shows a night, or 4-5 hours each day, and for part of our season we are weekends only. We shut down the servers and projectors every night, and have been doing so since March 2012. With five screens, we have not lost a hard drive yet, and this is the first time we have lost a power supply.
Our season is weekends only through March, April, and May. Full time from Memorial Day to Labor Day, then back to weekends only for September, October, and most of November.
Please do not start another debate about whether or not we should leave the servers running 24/7 during our season, we have been doing it this way for five full seasons, and are happy with the results.
Since we are a seasonal drive-in, and not running 5-6 showings each day, our replacement schedule for components such as power supplies, hard drives, fans, and coolant pumps is probably much longer than a typical indoor cinema.
Thank you for any and all feedback.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 05-25-2017 11:29 PM
Central (GMT -6:00) (5:29 AM Local)
In that case, I'd guess that both of them must be NFG. The whole point of double redundant power supplies is so that if one fails completely, the server can continue to function on the remaining good one.
That having been said, maybe the BIOS initialization procedure pulls a surge of power (e.g. to test all the fans at full RPMs briefly) that requires more amps than one by itself can provide? If so, then that might cause a situation whereby the machine would continue to work if a PSU failed after the BIOS initialization process was complete, but would not be able to boot from cold (at least, not easily) on a single PSU.
If the pins of the output connector are large enough to put multimeter probes on without the risk of shorting anything, and you can find a circuit diagram to tell you which pins are which, you could measure the output DC voltage to see if it's what it's supposed to be. You could also open the top of one of the supplies to see if there are any obvious signs of trouble in there, e.g. a blown capacitor vent and goo all over the PCB.
If both the PSUs that came in the server from the factory were of the same model and batch, then it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that they both failed at around the same time. It could be that one went some time ago and you weren't aware of it, but it was only when the other started to die that you noticed symptoms.
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