Question: Over the years, I've had to throw away a quite a few bits of computing equipment (and the like):

* Several ADSL routers with odd symptoms (losing wireless connections, losing wired connections, DHCP failures, DNS symptoms etc)
* Two PVRs spontaneously rebooting and corrupting themselves (despite the best efforts of the community to diagnose and help)
* One external hard disk still *claiming* to function, but corrupting data
* One hard disk as part of a NAS raid array "going bad" (as far as the NAS was concerned)

(This is in addition to various laptops and printers dying in ways unrelated to this question.)

Obviously it'll be impossible to tell for sure from such a small amount of information, but might these be related to power issues? I don't currently have a UPS for any of this equipment. Everything on surge-protected gang sockets, but there's nothing to smooth a power cut.

Is home UPS really viable and useful? I know there are some reasonably cheap UPSes on the market, but I don't know how useful they really are. I'm not interested in keeping my home network actually *running* during a power cut, but I'd like it to power down a bit more gracefully if the current situation is putting my hardware in jeopardy.

Answer: 
I've had a lot of problems in the past from power outages destroying equipment that was on surge protection. Now I consider UPS devices to be essential. In this day and age, there is no reason why I should have to suffer without power. All computers in my house are on UPS, as well as all network equipment. The lights and appliances may be off, but I'm still downloading from the Internet.
What I want is a pile of tiny UPS devices. They would only have to run my stuff for about 30 seconds as the bulk of power outages don't seem to even last that long.

Heck, from the same logic, I'd LOVE to see someone start making supercapacitor based replacements for laptop batteries so I can avoid cooking the real thing while plugged in at work.