A brown out or blink in the power supply coming into your home can ruin a hard drive in a split second. We did not find out until after the fact what happened, but the power went out for a second and then did again shortly thereafter. On the second outage was when the hard drive failed and the on-board video failed too on our desktop computer. And, yes, it was plugged into a surge suppressor. In a split second we needed data recovery services to get all of our documents and pictures back. The information is still there on a hard drive, it just gets jumbled up.

We found out that a tree fell against the power lines down the road. That can cause a power surge. There are built on safety systems in the grid to cut the power when that happens. However, they are also built to reset. The reset must have still had the tree on the line. The jolt might have cleared some of the problem because when it came back on it didn’t happen again. Some very big power lines will send out a test voltage to check the line. It is still a powerful and lethal voltage. If the test fails, the system won’t reset. All of this helps protect against fires and major damage to the grid, but the stuff in your house sure does take a hit.

Electric motors can usually take it without burning out. Electronic control circuits, computers, TVs and other things plugged into household current can’t. Sometimes even surge suppressors can’t clamp down the surge enough to save a sensitive device. Plus, the best surge suppressor in the world is not going to help a hard drive failure caused by a power loss right at the moment the hard drive was writing critical data to the spinning disks.