In all the cases I’ve seen, UPS is used for one of three things:
1) Provide power for the few seconds between an outage from street power and the backup generator kicking in
2) provide power for a few minutes at most so that the UPS can tell your system to shutdown
3) On instruments that are sensitive to power being removed, allow enough time for a human to properly shut down the equipment.
The amount of time that the battery can power your equipment will probably be less than advertised from the start and will degrade to somewhere near zero over a period of time and unless you periodically test the time, you won’t know.
One option that someone mentioned is using a laptop which is a great idea. If you can get away from using a RAID set, and switch to synching up two USB drives, then a laptop will provide power for the whole setup for several hours and you won’t have this huge, heavy, battery in your place. Also, you’ll have a somewhat accurate indicator of how long the battery will last.
Sorry that I didn’t answer the original question 😉 but I’m just trying to understand the need for full RAID (hopefully this is an enterprise or above consumer class RAID system, and not consumer class crap like Iomega)
