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: 
Short answer, yes.

Long answer, read this:

<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000632.html>
Surge protectors definitely don't protect you from everything, especially if your house wiring has problems. I've discovered that an ordinary surge protector plugged into an outlet with an open ground can actually make surges worse than equipment plugged straight into the outlet (the result was several fried xbox 360 power supplies).