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.