Windows asked a poll on Facebook – When do you turn off your PC? Most people answered they never turned it off. I’m also one of these people. I set my PC to sleep mode after 45 minutes of idle. I use my PC all the day, leaving it in sleep mode while I sleep.
But some comments on the poll make me worry. They said it would hurt the hard drives. Is that true?
If yes, I’m thinking about using a live Linux USB. (Lubuntu/Ubuntu to be precise). I will run everything from my old unused USB, and leave the hard drives unmounted. I’ve downloaded my favourite software for offline usage, so there won’t be any problems. But I’m not sure whether it’ll spare the hard drives. They are not mounted, but I can see them in the file manager. Please let me whether it is a good idea or not.
5 Answers -
Bruce Epper
June 18, 2012Simply having them unmounted helps nothing at all. The drive is still being powered and its circuitry is still active. I have yet to see any definitive proof that leaving a system powered on causes early failure of any equipment and I have been doing this stuff for more than 20 years. All electronic devices will eventually fail, but leaving them on 24/7 in my experience does not appear to hasten their demise to a significant degree.
Laga Mahesa
June 18, 2012You can set each drive to ‘sleep’ independantly when they’re not in use. This is what I do, as my desktop is on 24/7 and NEVER asleep – its either torrenting or serving files/ssh/vpn for me while I’m out and about.
Clearly it’s unlikely your primary boot and scratch (where your pagefile/hiberfile is) will spin down, so don’t store your important stuff there.
My C: (Windows, Program Files) and D: (Downloads, Scratch, Temp) partitions are on a single drive whose loss I couldn’t give two hoots about.
E:, F:, G:, H:, I:, N:, W:… different story.
Maung KoKo
June 18, 2012Thanks, Bruce and Laga. These are great explanations.
Terry
June 20, 2012Things can go wrong by leaving a computer powered up and things can go wrong by turning them on and off. There is a power surge when electronic devices initially power up but there is also wear from heat while they are left powered and those are just two of many nuanced variables. I have seen this very question raised many times and the issue is very complicated because of the sheer quantity of variables with different levels of impact especially a number of unknown variables.
For the reasons listed above my recommendation has been to turn things off if they will be unused for multiple days, but other than that have personal preference be your deciding factor.
hugo
August 3, 2012One thing i learned with hardware is:
dont have any pitty on it, if you do stuff to save it breaks, if you leave it always on works forever