


Have there been any studies on this effect?

What other factors should be considered?

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Power supply survival depends more on component quality than environmental factors.
















As previously stated, it's all about quality. More specifically, capacitor quality. It's rare to have any other component in a PSU fail, unless a capacitor fails causing another component to also fail. The only exception would be if you're running a very high load (90% or above). High loads can generate high amounts of heat which generally will cause components to fail prematurely.

For example i have some $30K+ Sun gear from 1994 that runs strong to this day. The unit is powered by a single phase 30A 240V PSU. There are enough disk arrays and CPU boards in it to draw a near constant 23A when under decent CPU load, but it has yet to have any issues.

On the other hand i also have some older Dell PowerEdge 1950's that run around 40% load from dual PSU's and i have replaced 3 PSU's in the last 5 years. That's spread across 12 servers, so 24 PSU's in total. Unfortunately the power where i have these located is known to fluctuate which probably attributes quite a bit to their failure rates.

So a high quality power conditioner can also help keep PSU's alive, the built in one in most UPS's is decent, but they cant touch a good standalone unit.

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