How bad is it for your computer to turn it off via power supply switch...

How bad is it for your computer to turn it off via power supply switch? I do this all the time when I am lazy and don't want to go through shut down.

Other urls found in this thread:

extremetech.com/computing/205382-ssds-can-lose-data-in-as-little-as-7-days-without-power
pcworld.com/article/2925173/debunked-your-ssd-wont-lose-data-if-left-unplugged-after-all.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_failure#Landing_zones_and_load.2Funload_technology
astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Qute bad, you shouldn't do that.
Do you like sit down and wait for the shut down screen or something? You can just put it on shutdown and get up from the desk, you know.

Do you have moving parts (i.e mechanical hard drives or DVD drives)? If so, it's causing wear on said parts. Otherwise, it's not physically damaging to shutdown at the PSU. A hard shutdown may be damaging if the machine is in the process of modifying necessary files, such as during a BIOS flash.

the os (especially windows 10) could be doing something important update or change and closing the computer like that *might* cause it to not boot up the next time. it's also good to shutdown normally because the os unmounts the drive properly.

It's bad for the OS and you can lose data.
Modern operating systems keep data in RAM and only write it to disk in a certain interval. If you abruptly power off your PC, any queued writes in RAM and data being currently written to disk will be lost. Modern filesystems are journaled so they SHOULD safely recover from this without corruption, but I wouldn't bet my money (or data) on it.

>all these plebs not booting from read only media

I corrupted and had to reinstall OS twice due to sudden electricity outage.

That is the fastest way to corrupt your system. soon you get to start from scratch. Have fun.

Pretty bad. You are basically making the power go out during a storm. If your computer is modifying a critical file on your HD and you kill the power you could leave that file unrepairable. And broken files lead to unbootable systems.

>He doesn't just put it to sleep and click his mouse to be back instantly to where everything was before

fshalt & turn it off that way is what we did back in the day.
modern file systems have journaling, copy on write and other safety measures. if its writing that file most likely the write just wont go thru

Holy shit is it actually bad? I've been doing it like that since I got my PC whenever something would freeze and a soft reboot isn't available...
So what are we supposed to do then? Use the front button?

>tfw i flipped the voltage switch once and my PSU exploded in my face

> He doesn't put on hibernation his computer

thats exactly the same. pressing the front button for X seconds shuts the psu down

>too lazy to shutdown

It's literally 2 clicks.

Hold the front power button down for ~10 seconds and it should shut off unless it's totally out to lunch.

Shutting off via the PSU switch isn't SUPPOSED to break anything if you're using modern software in a reasonable configuration, but some hard drives and SSDs don't store enough charge to guarantee they'll stop in a safe state if the PSU cuts out unexpectedly. It's a really bad idea to do that when you don't have to.

No, dipshit. The motherboard still manages the shutdown and you don't lose 5VSB.

If this happened in the last 20 years, you were doing yourself a favor.

Yes but softly.

Apart from interrupted write problems, you will generate self-induction in any powered coil in the PC (HDD, power regulators), all connected USB devices and some of the PSU's own coils. This causes wear on the circuitry and worse, may cause a spark somewhere.

It can fuck up SSDs hardcore and I don't mean the filesystem (single bad blocks, cascade failures etc), a half-written write cache would be less of a problem than on HDDs but other than Toshiba I don't see many brands spending money on proper power delivery / capacitance. The whole reason I bought into the solid state meme was resilience to environmental factors, turns out they need babying more than spinners (at least for consumer drives)

EuP/ErP + hard switching = dead SSDs

extremetech.com/computing/205382-ssds-can-lose-data-in-as-little-as-7-days-without-power

> generate self-induction
ayyyyy

it was about 15 years ago

>Open file for write
>Write 1kB
>Flush
>Write 1kB
>Flush
>Power lost during flush
>Reboot, filesystem journal restores us to before the second flush
>First flush still happened, file only partially written/updated.
Most applications assume file write operations are atomic, but they aren't.

are you retarded?

>what are coils the post

Should always wait until the message shows telling you it is safe to turn off your computer

If you switch it off and then on fast enough the computer sometimes doesn't even shut down or reboot. It's pretty cool to witness.

pcworld.com/article/2925173/debunked-your-ssd-wont-lose-data-if-left-unplugged-after-all.html

bad meme'd

i was 11

>he doesn't rip the psu cable out of the wall to turn off his computer

do you have a video?

>he doesn't flip the breaker switch for his room to turn off his computer

you'd have to be incredibly fast. They draw every quarter of a cycle, or so, and there's 60 of those a second here.

Is turning your computer off a common thing people do?.. I never turn mine off unless I have to. I just turn the monitors off when I'm going to bed or leaving the house. Pic related; my current uptime

>he doesnt stick his wet weewee in the electrical socket to turn off his computer

Yes. Most people don't waste money like you.

>he doesnt drive his car into the local substation to turn off the entire towns computers

Yeah, keeping a few hard drives on for a few hours is pretty expensive huh
it's not like my gpu is blasting in the middle of the night. and even if it were, who cares

>he wipes after taking a shit instead of letting it cake on

having the computer near my bed
yeah i cant sleep with the noise of a fan (at 30%) or my pump

>he lets it cake on instead of letting based doggo eat his asshole

> I do this all the time when I am lazy and don't want to go through shut down
Just push the power button, OS will gracefully shutdown for you.

alt+f4-enter... how lazy are you?

>Have a PSU to avoid sudden power loss issues
>Idiots ITT are just flipping the switch like it's a goddamn Apple //c

Meant UPS, fuck.

>he lives in the 3. world wo stable grid
99.9% availability here

Hard to figure out but true story:

>get mad at PC, turn off insta-off via switch on back
>call it a day
>go to sleep
>wake up the next morning, resume wor--
>"wait where did my file go"
>look for file
>filesystem file was on is not mounted (yes, Linux, whatever)
>great confusion
>go look for filesystem
>discover that filesystem has _completely disappeared_ from partition table and that it's now showing "Free space" where the partition was
>more confusion
>try and find partition with testdisk
>testdisk can't find it

I don't understand what happened at all, but yeah, I killed the power and it killed the partition. The rest of the disk was fine. I plan to have another go at some point in the future when I can image the drive (no moneyz for new HDDs to copy image onto at this point >.>)

lmao kys cuck.

Yeah, it's the 3rd world alright. Canada outside of a major city.

When I was a kid I flipped that red thingy and blew up a PSU

Most likely fine as long as you don't have mechanical hard drives or if you're not burning a CD or saving anything.

That's what it's for.

if you have a HDD its a pretty bad idea, can corrupt files

Not bad

a lot of the answers are regarding properly closing files (and critical configuration file corruption, like registry files, that makes the system unbootable)

I was wondering if there was anything physical that could happen nowadays.

back in the DOS days, there were disk parking utilities. before you powered off (always via that hard red power switch), you typed PARK and it'd say "your disk heads are now parked. you may safely power off" or something along those lines.

do today's hard drives know to do this during an accidental power failure? is there a lead-in? (extra power for 5 milliseconds, or however long it takes to detect power loss and properly park the heads)

> P.S: those IBM power switches were LOUD. it's like the ones in your circuit breaker boxes (for those of you not using fuse boxes)

...

...

>he doesn't create a virus designed to compromise power stations and turn off the world's computers

You made me curious and the answer I found is actually really interesting

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_failure#Landing_zones_and_load.2Funload_technology

Basically there's an area on the platters that is set aside specifically for emergency landings due to sudden power loss. The head is brought to this area by springs on older drives or they might use the motor itself as a little generator and harness the leftover kinetic energy to move the arm over there.

You might lose whatever was being written at the time. On windows which likes to occasionally write stuff to the registry you might corrupt the registry and be forced to roll back to a previous state.

On any decent OS if there's any file corruption detected you will likely be forced to run a disk check at next boot.

astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/

Yeah, IBM wore the head crash thing out of style in the early 2000s. Pretty much all storage devices have some kind of 'parking' logic that kicks in when they lose power. Sometimes it works.

:/
Nice

So many mixed anwers, I've been switching my PS off for ever and nothing hurtin. SSD, Windows 10.

But why it's like wiping your ass with your underwear and then wearing it


Food analogy

that was neat... the part about the spinning of the hard drive being used as a dynamo to power the heads into parked position after an accidental loss of power.