Nice!
I just picked up a few New (New Old Stock) UPS’s but now I am enamored of @hoarder’s comment about a SuperMicro 846 chassis to make it easy to add more HDDs.
APC should be a nice brand… was looking UPS for some datacenter math i was doing and found APC making version that required a forklift to place each battery in the UPS
lol i guess i shouldn’t be surprised, but i just hadn’t really imagined that size of UPS.
how i understood it, it was basically a shipping container size box or UPS adapter where one placed pallet sized batteries…
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One trick I learned is that you can take a SMT1000i UPS which normally takes a 12AH battery and install the larger 22AH batteries used for the larger model (SMT1500) to get more time (nearly double). The frame is the same but you need to remove a bracket for the smaller batteries to put the larger batteries. (You don’t get the higher VA rating of course but the aftermarket batteries give you higher capacity.0
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thats a nice trick, always nice when companies downgrade their products so diy’s can do easy and nice looking upgrades 
APC makes really solid UPS. And nice wd shucks you have there 
There are ofc other rackmount cases, but used Supermicro has the best value of them all. There’s a 847 variant that has 12 more drives bays on the back.
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Yeah after reading your comment I took a closer look at these cases - the 847 looks awesome. I assume I could drop in my current motherboard and then i suppose I would need a SATA/SAS HBA like a LSI Broadcom SAS 9300-8i. I like the idea of being able to easily add drives as I grow.
have a IBM one here, just a rebadged APC basically.
It calls for a RBC-7 replacement battery, which is around €239.
Which consists of 2 * 12v 17Ah CSB GP12170 batteries.
Bought 2 * 20Ah ultracell ones for 90 incl shipping, cobbled them together and it works like a charm.
Well see how long these live inside the UPS.
It gave me 20 more minutes of runtime, so thats good!
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just a stupid question from a beginner: if there is a power cut in my entire city and I have a UPS at home, will I still have a working internet connection? Does my ISP not need electricity? Or do they usually have UPS or something similar for that case? I am especially thinking about the fiber distribution box in my street… I think that needs some kind of power supply?
Your ISP should (if they’re a decent company) have UPSs and generators to keep their infrastructure running.
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So much for “don’t spend money running nodes”!
(I still have a lot of spare bays on my ReadyNAS so it’ll be a LONG time before I need to consider buying another chassis, if ever)
I know, I have one of those 4U Supermicro 36 drive bay chassis and it’s a loud power hungry monster. I’m currently using my super low power (and low noise) Synology 2419+ and it’s barely audible in a silent office. I couldn’t imagine firing up that 4U Supermicro chassis in here. I also still have 3 empty drive bays available and storage is cheap these days. I could add another 36TB for under $600 if I time it right.
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You can get 3rd party batteries for a fraction of the price. I recently got a used APC Smart-UPS 1400 for £1 off Ebay and as expected the battery was dead. A replacement RBC7 was ~£55 from a reputable Ebay seller.
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Hmmmm… batteries are one of those things that can go wrong in too spectacular a way for me to risk having cheap Chinese knock-offs running 24/7 in my home.
No matter how reputable the eBay seller may be.
Not much can go wrong with sealed lead-acid batteries used in UPS units. RBCs cost so much, that you could buy double the amount of batteries you need, and these would be high quality batteries from a reputable vendor. Cheap chinese knock-offs will cost even less than that.
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RBC-7 contain CSB brand batteries, you can easily buy it on the local seller and make “original” battery yourself (just replace elements and reuse wires) 
It is not only because i might keep my internet connection alive when there is a power cut.
More for not ruining my hardware due to brownouts and voltage dips/spikes.
The quality of the power that comes out of quality UPS devices is much cleaner that what one might get from a wall socket.
Here in The Netherlands we do not have much power cuts, and if they happen they are for larger areas.
Brownouts are also unlikely. maybe once a couple of years.
But that does not mean i am willing to risk my servers and other equipment.
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yeah… i don’t think i trust Ebay sellers for batteries for a UPS…
Where to go to when they explode and ruin my servers?
Rather just buy them with a normal store, which is required by law to sell good batteries.
And if the batteries decide to go thermonuclear on me i can just go back to that store.
RBC-7 specifically has the CSB GP 12170 12V 17Ah .
so you could buy these separately and join them manually.
That should be cheaper.
I checked the seller and they have a proper shop in the UK, a website and thousands of good reviews on various review sites. I still opted to buy from their Ebay shop because of the added buyer protection.
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Thanks, I know it very well, I did it with a lot of APC “cartridges” and various type of CSB batteries. It really much cheaper then buy original new “cartridges”.