News - Split-second power outage knocks Toshiba memory factory offline

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Voltage drop could reduce company's output by 20 per cent for the next two months.

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Read more.

I'm confused, if they had a backup power supply system in place, why didn't it pick up the slack? Those things are meant to handle blackouts, much less brownouts. And why should a brownout halt production for 2 weeks?

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

I'm confused, if they had a backup power supply system in place, why didn't it pick up the slack? Those things are meant to handle blackouts, much less brownouts. And why should a brownout halt production for 2 weeks?

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This - epic fail. Unless their backup power supply system hadn't been tested properly and didn't have sufficient capacity to handle a blackout? But tbh for something clearly as critical as this, I'd expect them to have an online UPS or similar, so unless someone's screwed up bigtime I'm not really sure what's gone wrong.

Probably wrong but doesnt any UPS take like a couple of milliseconds to actually take over? In this case that 1millisecond caused a great deal of damage, you would have thought they would use a much more thoroughly tested system. I know at the fabrication site in plymouth they always have it well maintained as any power cut is critical.

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Even though the facility has backup power systems in place to handle just such an emergency, the voltage drop was apparently so severe that they were overwhelmed.

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I agree, how severe can a voltage drop get exactly? The worst it can get is no voltage.
Surely though for a factory that relies on constant, reliable power they should have an online UPS system plus backup generators that can handle the load?

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Originally Posted by Hicks12

Probably wrong but doesnt any UPS take like a couple of milliseconds to actually take over?

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That's what capacitors are for. Hell, you can even use a battery as a capacitor to do the same job. And factory backup power supplies aren't exactly small fries.

sorry, had a late night last night :D.

Forget i said that... makes me ashamed im doing electronics haha! But yeah your right, clearly they hadnt invested well enough on something that is critical :P

Its called sods law
sods law states that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong and the most inconvenient time. So the multi million $$$ UPS system will have an engineer servicing it at precisely the time that the power (which has been 100% reliable) fails.

As to restart times, I have seen plenty of industrial processes that if they go tits up can take a week or more to get going again, quiet often its due to contamination issues and cleaning. Then again I've worked on stuff that if the power failed and couldnt be restored quickly everybody would just run away.

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Originally Posted by Flibb

As to restart times, I have seen plenty of industrial processes that if they go tits up can take a week or more to get going again, quiet often its due to contamination issues and cleaning. Then again I've worked on stuff that if the power failed and couldnt be restored quickly everybody would just run away.

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Yeah, if it were an earthquake, fair enough. But a brownout? :\

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Originally Posted by Hicks12

sorry, had a late night last night :D.

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We've all had days like that. ;)

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

Yeah, if it were an earthquake, fair enough. But a brownout? :\

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Nope, seen a site knocked out by a brief power surge, and they had full UPS and generators. All it takes is one thing to go wrong in the switch to UPS or the return to mains supply and all kinds of nasty things can happen. What knocked us out was the switch back to mains.

So a poorly designed backup supply, then.

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it could cause the price of memory to increase quite significantly in response to reduced supplies

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This is terrible news.

maybe they should have an online UPS like i do...

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Originally Posted by GoNz0

maybe they should have an online UPS like i do...

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They do, but apparently it was faulty.

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

They do, but apparently it was faulty.

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yeh mine went bang a few weeks ago, lucky i had a spare from the sainsbury petrol station swap outs i did :)