Some things last a surprisingly long time.
This can surely be said about the ATX power supply, a Corsair CX430 (Model: CMPSU-430CX) of my primary workstation, which had undergone a lot of changes in the past.
But today's power cut (house wide) was too much for the PSU. Although I properly shut down my machine prior to the power cut, the power surge after the power came back online seemed to have fried the power supply for good.
Besides the Corsair CX430 ATX PSU, nothing in the house got fried, when the power came back.
Out of curiosity I wanted to know when I purchased this ATX Power Supply. And I had to go back. Way back. I found the order confirmation in my mail archive - dated June 7th 2011 - from a Swiss online shop which meanwhile no longer exists (Internet.ch).
Two thousand eleven! That's, almost exactly to date, 15 years ago!
That date matches one of my very early blog posts, where I built the initial version of my workstation. The same mini-tower (Sharkoon AL2) is still in use by the way, but obviously almost the whole interior has changed. Almost - because the PSU was the last original piece.
With today's power supply failure, the last remnant of the original hardware components of my primary workstation has been removed.
This workstation, and with it the Corsair PSU, has undergone some major changes:
Farewell, Corsair CX430. You've done your duty. Thank you.
Having worked with computers for longer than I can remember, it wasn't the first power supply that got fried. This experience, and also the fact being an IT professional doing its living working on the computer, taught me to have spare parts for every component at hand.
After a couple of verification tests (is it REALLY the PSU or maybe a cable or the motherboard?) I grabbed a spare ATX Power Supply from my lab and built it into the tower. Good situation to dust-clean the interior of the tower, too.
45 minutes after the power outage I was back online again. Now that the spare PSU is in use, I obviously need another ATX Power Supply. Either as primary PSU for my workstation or as new spare. I decided to order a BeQuiet Pure Power 13M with modular cables (AMZN product link).
PS: If you need an excuse to keep spares (cables, power supplies, disks, etc) around, use this blog post as proof!
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