Do you shut your computer off at night / when you're not going to use it for the next couple of hours?

Do you shut your computer off at night / when you're not going to use it for the next couple of hours?

I've heard many stories from many different sides. Turning your computer off and on again repeatedly will shorten it's lifetime, whereas other people say leaving it running forever or for long periods at a time has the same effect.

What do you lot do? Any experts on this topic here? What's the verdict, Sup Forums,

Bump. Need to know.

Traps are gay

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Computer Sup Forumseek here.

I think this theory is for hard disk drives only as solid state drives have no moving parts. What I've heard is that if you turn your computer on and off constantly, it wears out the HDD since the operating system is obviously located on it and it's having to read constantly. And I've heard that if you leave it on, it won't have to repeatedly load the operating system, thus increasing the lifespan of the HDD.

I don't know if this is actually true, but I remember hearing this a few years ago.

I have a home theatre pc that stays on 24/7
Its 3 years old and never skipped a beat. I turn it off about once a year, remove the cover and blow all the dust out with an air compressor but that's it.

>it wears out the HDD
because the spindle motor needs to spin up and the heads need to un-park from power-off parking. Both of these actions cause most of the mechanical stress a drive experiences. Normal seeking is low-stress by comparison.
Furthermore, thermal cycling causes large parts to expand and contract, like CPUs and GPUs as well as hard drives, which isn't good for them, especially where interface and surrounding materials have different thermal coefficients of expansion.
t.leaves computer on for months at a time

So leaving it on has no negative effects on SSD's then? Cool. I might start leaving my PC on then.

I've done it both ways for years and never noticed any difference.

In a more professional environment where people don't care for the equipment you give them shit does go bad, but this is stuff left on all the time sucking up dust and literally beat to crap, not your gaming rig idling away while you dream of hentai.

You still have to keep in mind heat. Heat is probably the major enemy of computer components. If you turn off your PC, you give it "cool" time.

Thanks for the info. Appreciate it.

Same. I've done both and not noticed a any difference but this is anecdotal.

The real question I presume OP wants to ask is about running costs.

Does leaving your computer running 24/7, and thus using electricity, outweigh the cost of replacing the parts that user speaks about here Depends entirely on your energy costs and component costs. I doubt there's much difference though, at least not enough to worry about.

I turn mine off every night, but only because I like to sleep in absolute darkness and all the glowing lights piss me off.

spread the word

Leaving anything at the same temperature is good because when things heat and cool they expand and contract. Different materials expand and contract at different rates so every time they heat and cool it creates tension and cracks.

Leave it on. This is also true for cars. Taxi cabs can have a hundreds of thousands of miles on them but still be in great shape.

I have an SSD, and I leave my laptop on all the time most days. It's just easier, and faster. I use sleep mode if I want to power it off.

I usually have resource intensive tasks that I run while I'm sleeping anyway, so the long wake times are put to good use.

I know power-cycling HDDs will wear out the motor. However leaving the machine on will wear out the cooling fan, which in a laptop isn't always easy to replace. Very frequent power-cycling may accelerate the degradation of the solder joints on soldered in CPUs & GPUs too. So idk. I guess it's up to you. For me, it's more convenient to just leave them running all the time.

Not mere heat, but cycling. If your cooling is up to par in the first place, you won't need to shut it down to cool off.

>Depends entirely on your energy costs and component costs
And downtime costs, if one is using the machine for social or capital endeavors.

How has nobody mentioned the real issue here.

SECURITY

by leaving your computer on at all times you are greatly increasing your chances of your computer being a target for hackers. The difference to your hDD is absolutely negligible. It's your wallet and credit that may take the biggest beating by leaving your computer always on.

>wear out the cooling fan, which in a laptop isn't always easy to replace
>accelerate the degradation of the solder joints
Oh yeah, especially in the lead-free era. Well-considered course of action, user.

When IBM sold 300 megabytes hard disks, their advice was "shut it off as less as possible" because their only critical moment was the power-on spin up

SSDs have a read write limit and constantly wear themselves out. while running, an operating system will always read and write stuff, even if youre not using it

also, for laptops, it will definitely wear out the battery

Ever hear of anyone wearing out an SSD?

didn't think so. It's not a realistic concern.

I haven't turned my computer off for more than a year now, works fine

The computer will wear out before the SSD does unless you're thrashing the SSD with constant writes cycle. Read cycles don't really matter, it's when the SSD needs to erase data in order to write something damage is caused.

I let mine have a little sleepy during zzzz time

>not turning off the router before going to bed

I thought reading was basically free. If there is a limit, it is huge.

I had one just die on me one fine New Year's morning. You'd get plenty of warning via S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics, in any case.

No one turn of routers dingus. Insanely inconvenient.

More so than shutting down and bringing up a computer, and waiting for everything to load? I don't know...

My computer is ready on the desktop in 14 seconds. That's way faster than a router so....

I just use sleep mode. Instant on

>not building your own router
oh, well, alright then

As an IT admin, I can tell you we don't like to turn off machines with spinning drives - they don't always want to spin back up.

That's changing with SSD's, so yeah, I don't ever turn mine off voluntarily.

Yeah, the quality between brands is astounding, cheap knock offs go bad way before a Samsung, Kingston, Corsair or an Intel. The Samsung Pro's are capable of writing 2.5 pB before failure.

The refurb that lasted just over a year was a Corsair. I had /tmp elsewhere and I'm pretty sure I had /var/log on spinning rust. Hmm.

I almost always turn computers off at night or if I'm going to be away for more than a few hours.

I have one with a 9-year-old CPU, MB, and PSU. All still working fine.

>8 years still running
That's because you don't look at weird enough porn on it

Funny enough, my laptop has a setting for Desktop mode that charges it up and then let's it drop, and charges it back up so it's never empty or too full.

Any charging or discharging of a lithium-ion battery wears on it, especially with the usual heat that can be found in proximity to a laptop. Better to just cut it off entirely once it's charged.

Maybe you just got a bad one, I've got an Intel 520 series that is going on three years with zero SMART warnings and 100% life left per Intel's diagnostics. I doubt I'll ever wear it out.