Good afternoon, mechanical hard drives, you make a case! Not only is there a large current draw for startup, but you are essentially rolling on dry bearings for a few revolutions until their floating design puts the platter spindle airborne.

 

During boot up the head rack also gets a good workout.

 

I'm all SSD here, but my avarice kicks in when viewing the monthly electric bill. So I still turn my computers off, at least, most of the time.

 

Geoff

 

From: Brian Vogel

Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2020 12:20 PM

To: main@TechTalk.groups.io

Subject: Re: [TechTalk] respecting leaving computers on, or not

 

Geoff,

          I don't think that most of us think of LEDs as "light bulbs" in the conventional sense, and you're 100% correct on the difference between them and incandescents, which is what was being referred to at the time that quotation was written.  True LED bulbs are a very recent thing as far as consumer lighting in traditional screw-in bulb form goes.

           Until and unless computers are all using SSDs, the biggest stress on HDDs is generally at boot time.  So computers do tend to "pop" when turned off and on far more often than when in continuous use.  Unfortunately, I still see that all the time.   Almost all of my service calls for dead machines are secondary to either power supply failure or HDD failure that comes when the owner tries to power up their machine.  There's no way of knowing whether the failure occurred during the previous power down, or the actual power up, but it's one of the two.

            The issue of power savings is a thing of its own, and does deserve consideration.
--

Brian - Windows 10 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 2004, Build 19041  

Always remember that computers are just glorified light bulbs - they rarely fail in continuous use and usually go pop when turned off and on.

        ~ Technician with the username Computer Bloke, on Technibble.com