Do Short Power Outages Hurt PSU Functionality if They Don't Kill the Unit?

[Falling Anvil]

Hey all,

I'm just curious to know if short power outages that do not kill PSUs might harm their operation(voltage regulation, ripple, efficiency, that kind of thing) once power comes back up. By that I mean short outages that last maybe a second to a few seconds and then turn back on again. I live in a area where this happens occasionally, maybe one or twice a year on average, which I suppose is somewhere in between rare enough to leave alone and concerning enough to possibly buy a UPS or something to deal with it, and I am just curious about that. It wasn't as big of a deal with my Corsair 550VX on account of how it seemed to work fine after each outage and it's age by the time I realized that this was a thing, but about two weeks ago I shifted to a new case and a Seasonic X650 so I guess the new high performance purchase puts me on attention now.

Anyways, yesterday I got another one of these short outages, and while it didn't seem to affect anything, I was wondering if there might possibly be some lingering damage to my PSU that I ought to be worried about enough to address the issue.

TL;DR, should I be worried if a power outage comes and nothing breaks?

 

[mhenley]

I'd be more worried about HDD damage and software corruption as a result of power outages. Buy a good UPS and you won't have to worry about damage to your components.