Avian’s Blog

I'm a pretty heavy Munin user. In recent years I've developed a habit of adding a graph or two (or ten) for every service that I maintain. I also tend to monitor as many aspects of computer hardware as I can conveniently write a plugin for. At the latest count, my Munin master tracks a bit over 600 variables (not including a separate instance that monitors 50-odd VESNA sensor nodes deployed by IJS).

Monitoring everything and keeping a long history allows you to notice subtle changes that would otherwise be easy to miss. One of the things that I found interesting is the long-term behavior of power supplies. Pretty much every computer these days comes with software-accessible voltmeters on various power supply rails, so this is easy to do (using lm-sensors, for instance).

Take for example voltage on the +5 V rail of an old 500 watt HKC USP5550 ATX power supply during the last months of its operation:

From the start, this power supply seemed to have a slight downward trend of around -2 mV/month. Then for some reason the voltage jumped up for around 20 mV, was stable for a while and then sharply dropped and started drifting at around -20 mV/month. At that point I replaced it, fearing that it might soon endanger the machine it was powering.

The slow drift looks like aging of some sort - perhaps a voltage reference or a voltage divider before the error amplifier. Considering that it disappeared after the PSU was changed it seems that it was indeed caused by the PSU and not by a drifting ADC reference on the motherboard or some other artifact in the measurements. Abrupt shifts are harder to explain. As far as I can see, nothing important happened at those times. An application note from Linear mentions that leakage currents due to dirt and residues on the PCB can cause output voltage shifts.

It's also interesting that the +12 V rail on the same power supply showed a bit different pattern. The last voltage drop is not apparent there, so whatever caused the drop on the +5 V line seemed to have happened after the point where regulation circuit measures the voltage. The +12 V line isn't separately regulated in this device, so if the regulation circuit would be involved, some change should have been apparent on +12 V as well.

Perhaps it was just a bad solder joint somewhere down the line or oxidation building up on connectors. At 10 A, a 50 mV step only corresponds to around 5 mΩ change in resistance.

This sort of voltage jumps seem to be quite common though. For instance, here is another one I recently recorded on a 5 V, 2.5 A external power supply that came with CubieTruck. Again, as far as I can tell, there were no external reasons (for instance, power supply current shows no similar change at that time).

I have the offending HKC power supply opened up on my bench at the moment and nothing looks obviously out of place except copious amounts of dust. While it would be interesting to know what the exact reasons were behind these voltage changes, I don't think I'll bother looking any deeper into this.