I’ve heard from several sources that, concerning the life of your drive, leaving it on all night does less damage than the “shock” of shutting down and starting your hard drives if you shut the computer down.
Is this true?
An electronics teacher at my school told me any kind of “shock” to anything that uses electricity is bad. By leaving a light bulb on 24/7 you will increase it’s life rather than turning it on and off everyday.
With almost all computers nowadays, they’ll go into a power saving mode and stop the HD spinning to prevent wear and tear. Leaving it on will not accelerate damage.
Turning the computer on and off doesn’t shock the components one bit, as they are designed with that intention in mind. Turning it off won’t accelerate damage either.
So, basically, no, thats not true.
Previously discussed:
Should I turn my computer off at night?
That was August of '01 so maybe things have changed. But what I don’t see in the old thread is the issue of heating & cooling causing cold solder joints in the power supply. However the power supply is probably the cheapest & most easily replaced part in the PC.
This becomes a cost/benefit issue. Is it worth the extra 15% (or whatever) bulb life to leave all your lamps on and pay the higher electricity bill?
In 1997 my brother and I bought the exact same computers from a Sam’s Club. While he left his running all the time, I shut mine down every night. His first hard drive lasted a little over a year, mine still has the original and my grandkids use it without problem. I see no reason to leave a computer running all night.
I think one of the concerns of turning your computer on and off all the time it the fact that the parts heat up and cool down several times. I’ve heard this can cause mechanical parts to become brittle, don’t have any evidence behind it though. As far as power, if the monitor is off, an idling computer doesn’t take very much power anyways even if the hard drive is running. The motor takes the most power when starting up, but once it’s moving it takes very little power to sustain the speed.
IMHO…I believe that if you do not have a ups or if you live in an area with power problems (surges/brownouts etc.) , it is probalby prudent to turn the computer off. I do not buy in to the “leave it on all the time” theory.
I tend to lean towards the “leave it on all the time” theory, but my experience at work goes contrary to that. About 5 years ago, we got about 70 new Dell P200s with Seagate 2gig hard drives. Some of these went in our computer lab, while the rest went to faculty, staff, etc. The machines in the lab ran 24/7 for 5 years, while the staff tended to turn theirs off at night.
This summer when I replaced them all, about half of the lab machines hard drives had failed, while none of the staff-use machines had a HD failure.
May not be a good example, since the lab machines probably got used more, but it’s the closest real world example I have.
Whenever the hard drive spins up, it draws alot of power as the computer boots up. The computer warms up when started and cools down when turned off. This can shorten the disk’s lofe.
You can specify settings for the drive in Start-Settings-Control Panel-Power Options. Here you can set a time for the hard drive to stop if the computer is not used.
How many watts does a hard drive use while spinning anyway?
Wow, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a thread digress this far this fast!!
His hard drive failure was an anomaly. His failed either due to abusive shipping and handling or a manufacturing defect. I have seen systems with commercial off the shelf desktop hard drives used in 24/7 server applications which tended to fail far past the 3 year point.
This is an old, old discussion with no real solid answer. I’ve read about this so many times its not even funny. In the end it turns out that you can leave it on or turn it off with similar results, so it comes down to more of a personal preference. Don’t feel like waiting for the machine to boot? Just leave it on, accept the slightly higher cost in electricity, and take comfort in the fact that your machine’s parts don’t have to take the shock of starting up all the time and experience the expansion and contraction as it warms and cools. Personally I like to shut mine off at night since it tends to warm the (very small) room up.
I asked WD, the people who make the HD’s, after all, I fugured they would know. They said in theory the HDs should last the same amount of time, but in practice, they last longer if you turn it off at night.
Hey, I think I said that before a few times 
I agree with Bongmaster, there is no real answer. It can go either way - it depends on defects in the drive, probably most importantly how you use it (a drive with lots of accesses will fail much faster - this is why mechanical parts are usually rated by how many times they function instead of time from purchase - 10 years or 10,000 miles, so to speak), and even how stable your electrical grid is. Additionally, “hard drive failure” can be caused by dozens of things.
I turn my computer off nights in the summer (because it is friggin’ hot) and on in the winter (because it is friggin’ cold), and yes, a powerful computer can heat a room on its own, especially when coupled with your body heat and good insulation. My apartment mates left in December, leaving me alone. I left the heater off, and pretty much holed up alone in my room when I was home - the other rooms and living room were frigid, but my room was always warmish.
The issue has more to do with power conservation than wear and tear on the hardware. Laptops don’t power down their hard drives and fans to keep them alive longer.
There is an additional problem with HDs that are left on and don’t have a power-saving mode to spin them down. Even with clean-room conditions, there is some dust inside and this tends to increase as the HD ages. When the HD spins continually, bouyancy effects concentrate this dust in the center. Normally this isn’t a problem because the moving arm/head causes enough disturbance to keep it distributed fairly evenly, but if the disk spins for a long time with no arm movement and then makes a disk access near the center of the platter, the density change caused the the dust “cloud” can cause a head crash. I’ve seen some academic studies of the fluid dynamics involved (fascinating stuff, mostly designed to entertain grad students), and it’s a practical problem with large platters. It’s probably less of a real-world issue for smaller drives.
That said, I leave my machines on all the time except when I will be out of the office for several days, and I have machines which have been running continually for over five years with the same HDs (with periodic OS reboots but 90+% uptime). Anecdotal evidence on either side is pretty meaningless, but I haven’t found a significant problem with HD life in machines left on.