APC Back-UPS CS 350 USB/Serial - Reviews

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25.6.2017

APC are market leaders in UPS products, for a good reason. It's a solid, reliable product that does exactly what it's supposed to do - gives you vital 'grace' minutes in the event of a power cut in which you can close all your open files and shutdown properly, safeguarding both files and hard disk from loss or corruption.I have tested this model and found that it reliably switches to battery when I pull the plug on the UPS (simulating a power cut). You can set it to beep several times in case you didn't realise the power was out(!). I have it supporting a Xeon server, a NAS drive, an unmanaged switch from it's three output supplies. Why the switch? - I'll get to that shortly.It reports it has power for 10 minutes under that load. To protect the attached hardware I have not tested it to the point of collapse as I do want those things to close safely, but i have found I can perform a shutdown of attached hardware in about 3 minutes, so there's ample safety margin there.The one irritation in the design will only affect you if you want to prepare for the possibility of unattended shutdown. I would have thought this was everyone, but the vendor tells me otherwise. Do you power off your PC every time you walk away from it? Exactly. So you will probably be interested in the data cable. This tells an attached PC that the power has been cut, so perhaps it should start to close down. The irritation is that there is only one data port on the UPS, yet three power out ports. This means you can only tell one supported device the power is out; the other two have to fend for themselves. Now, I understand you can buy an additional network card of some sort from APC, but that's both an additional cost and beyond the terms of reference of this review. However in broad terms the reader will appreciate that some software is required to listen to the data signal and to take whatever action is necessary. This brings me to discuss the software part of the APC solution, without which the APC is nothing more than a very large capacitor!APC recommend 'Powerchute' and this can be downloaded for free from their website. If this is for you or not depends on what your goals are. If all you want to make provision for is to shut down one PC if the power goes off while you are away, look no further. Powerchute will do exactly that. However, if you have a fair degree of technical ability and you want to do something a little more ambitious, like close down multiple devices from the one signal (without buying more hardware like network cards), or even close down applications in a specific way ahead of powering down the machine, then Powerchute won't help. I found countless software packages - all free - that will close down one machine just like Powerchute will, but none of them provided any sort of 'hook' that could be used to trigger any other process. In fact after much looking I could find only a small program from what seemed to be from a 'one man band' that monitored a UPS and, under power off conditions, would run another program as you specified. Usually, people want to run a batch file (.bat) that will perform whatever housekeeping is required, and lastly, tell the PC to power off. Windows is supposed to be able to do this natively, but I couldn't get it to work. Obviously you will need a certain level of technical competence to take advantage of the possibilities, but you can see that a batch file would allow you to potentially send messages to other connected machines telling them to take actions including to power down too, perhaps activating other batch files on the remote machines to achieve this. If you really are an advanced user, you can do as i did and write a closedown script using the free tool Autohotkey and then call that from the batch file. In this way I can really finesse the events I want to take place in my absence, even sending messages to users connected to my server warning them about the imminent close down, before finally sending the hardware the shutdown message.In conclusion then, the APC UPS is a solid and reliable piece of hardware that will buy you the time you need to protect your hardware and software from being rudely interrupted. How sophisticated you'd like your response to the 'power off' message to be will dictate what sort of software you choose to respond to that message. You have the potential for all responses from the most intricate to the most basic controlled power off. Whichever route you want to go, the APC UPS will buy you the time you need to complete your closedown strategy safely.Read full review...