Resolved Turn off hard drive during computer sleep?

While looking over the power settings on my desktop, I have the hard drive set to never turn off. I seem to remember that was conventional wisdom years ago, but is it still true today? I'm not concerned about power consumption, but potential shortening of life of the hard drive with the off-on transition. Am I being overly cautious? I have Win 7 Home Premium set to Balanced Power setting. Is it even desirable for a desktop to go to sleep? I have some tasks scheduled to run overnight, but the "wake computer to start this task" box is checked on all.

 

"Hibernation" is primarily for notebooks and not recommended for PCs - as suggested in that How-to article. For desktops (with W7 or new OSes), the Hybrid Sleep mode is best.

As far as what is best, turning off or leaving it on 24/7, years and years ago, electronics was much less efficient. This meant lots of heat was generated and such equipment had to "warm up" before it became stable. This put the electronics through very wide swings between cold and fully heated. Also, the raw materials used to make electronic components were no where near as pure as they are today.

With that in mind, note too that matter expands as it heats and contracts when it cools - with greater expanses between expansion and contraction with greater temperature extremes, and with the impurities expanding/contracting at different rates than other materials.

Frequent cycles of extreme expansion/contraction could (often did) eventually create micro-stress fractures in the materials - this "fatigue" can result in component failure.

But today's electronics are made with much purer raw materials. They are much more efficient so much less heat is created. And even ambient (room) temperatures are much more stable. So material "fatigue" is not the problem.

So unless your computer is outside, I recommend you let it go to sleep. If you must turn it off, I recommend turning it off when you are done for the day, then back on in the morning. Not on and off all multiple times a day (let it sleep).

For hard drives in particular - forcing them to spin 24/7 just wears out the bearings faster. Only in servers that require 24/7/365 access should they be left on.

 

Bill, thanks for your informed response. That was kinda what I thought, but wanted to be sure. I'll let it nap between uses and give the HDD a rest.