To Shut Down or Not Shut Down

[wutang112878]

I've recently got a new computer and its awesome and I want to treat it as well as I can.  I've never had this type of affection for a computer so I never cared about running them into the ground.  
 
Which begs my question, is it better to shut-down daily or leave it on?  I really dont care about power savings and at night when I leave it on its simply idle.  I'm just wondering which causes more wear and tear the extra 10-12 hours of idle time each night or whatever stress rebooting puts on the machine.  If its relevant my machine is an HP Zbook with a SSD where all programs are installed and the HDD just stores files, so the only thing moving at night should be the fan at times.

 

[Couperin47]

This debate has raged for as long as there have been home computers, though of course it mostly involved wear to the HD until recently. You're dealing with a laptop which means, depending on what level of hibernate/sleep settings you may be using, your HD, cpu fan and certainly the signal to the display are probably off. So we have zero difference regarding mechanical wear. Once we're beyond natal electronic failure, everything will probably last well into obsolescence. That leaves exactly one real issue afaik: when plugged in is it connected directly to a wall outlet or to a decently filtered UPS ?  If the former, a near bye lightning strike or other serious voltage spike might somehow make it thru the ps brick and, of course, turned off it isn't vulnerable to infection.

 

[Marceline]

I would suggest putting it in sleep mode at the end of the day. Get the best of both worlds, the machine is for all practical purposes not running, and it will instantly come back on with whatever you had open when you open up the lid the next morning.

 

[SumnerH]

I leave my desktop on 24/7.  The screensaver's set to like 10-15 minutes and then 10-15 minutes after that the machine goes to sleep and shuts off the monitor.  The hard drives also spin down if they're idle for more than a few minutes, so at any given moment unless I'm doing heavy backup/file maintenance/etc there's at most one or two drives spun up and drawing real power.
 
The machine is set to Wake on Lan, so if I hit it from my laptop or phone or from work or whatever I can still get to the files and services it provides (which you can't do if the machine's physically powered off).  And it'll wake up (but leave the monitor asleep) periodically to check scheduled tasks and adjust the thermostat/lights/whatever; the energy savings from having intelligent AC/heat control vastly outweigh the savings I'd get from powering it off.

 

[SeoulSoxFan]

If you're using SSD (and why wouldn't you) getting it to awake from sleep is instant. 
 
Don't forget that CPUs and monitors draw power like crazy, and over the course of a few years it will mean hundreds of $$$ in additional electricity bill. 
 
If you're on HD, get the newest Samsung Pro SSD drive and turn it off/sleep as much as you can. 

 

[SumnerH]

If you're using SSD (and why wouldn't you) getting it to awake from sleep is instant. 
 
Don't forget that CPUs and monitors draw power like crazy, and over the course of a few years it will mean hundreds of $$$ in additional electricity bill.

 
I measured my rig with a Kill a Watt a few months back:
 
My 24" monitor draws about 16 watts when it's on (the spec list it as maximum of 50 watts IIRC, but you'd have to jack up the brightness to max to approach that).
The computer draws about 25 watts idle (not sleeping, but with energy-friendly CPU s) up to ~100-110 watts under load.  It's a 430-watt power supply but obviously I'm never anywhere near taxing it.
 
I use integrated graphics; external GPUs can add considerably to those numbers (typically 10-40 watts idle and 150-300 watts under load, depending on the graphics card.).  I also run off of an SSD, the hard drives spin down when the machine's idle.  If you have your hard drives constantly spinning, turn off SpeedStep, overclock the machine, etc, that idle number can easily go up another 10-50 watts.  If you build with idle power in mind, you can save a bit on that (Mac Minis draw <20 watts idle, typically).

If I never went into standby/sleep mode, it'd cost about $35/year in electricity to run 24x7, a little over half from the computer and the rest from the monitor.

Asleep the whole thing draws about 2-3 watts, which is almost exactly the same as it draws when it's powered off but not unplugged.

 

[SeoulSoxFan]

 
I measured my rig with a Kill a Watt a few months back:
 
My 24" monitor draws about 16 watts when it's on (the spec list it as maximum of 50 watts IIRC, but you'd have to jack up the brightness to max to approach that).
The computer draws about 25 watts idle (not sleeping, but with energy-friendly CPU s) up to ~100-110 watts under load.  It's a 430-watt power supply but obviously I'm never anywhere near taxing it.
 
I use integrated graphics; external GPUs can add considerably to those numbers (typically 10-40 watts idle and 150-300 watts under load, depending on the graphics card.).  I also run off of an SSD, the hard drives spin down when the machine's idle.  If you have your hard drives constantly spinning, turn off SpeedStep, overclock the machine, etc, that idle number can easily go up another 10-50 watts.  If you build with idle power in mind, you can save a bit on that (Mac Minis draw <20 watts idle, typically).

If I never went into standby/sleep mode, it'd cost about $35/year in electricity to run 24x7, a little over half from the computer and the rest from the monitor.

Asleep the whole thing draws about 2-3 watts, which is almost exactly the same as it draws when it's powered off but not unplugged.

 
Thanks for that SH. 
 
I should have said it really depends on the rig & where you live. For example, I have the following setup:

• 30" (main), 24", and 20" Dell monitors
• 800 watt power supply
• 1 SSD + 5 internal hard drives & 2-3 external drives at any given time
• 2 GPUs to power the 3 monitors (1 GPU is a dual-stack doozer)

Plus -- and this is a biggie -- I'm paying Korea's fairly ridiculous electricity bill, where I've noticed anywhere from $35-$60 USD equivalent difference per month depending on how much I put my PC to sleep/turn off. 

 

[SumnerH]

 
Thanks for that SH. 
 
I should have said it really depends on the rig & where you live. For example, I have the following setup:

• 30" (main), 24", and 20" Dell monitors
• 800 watt power supply
• 1 SSD + 5 internal hard drives & 2-3 external drives at any given time
• 2 GPUs to power the 3 monitors (1 GPU is a dual-stack doozer)

Plus -- and this is a biggie -- I'm paying Korea's fairly ridiculous electricity bill, where I've noticed anywhere from $35-$60 USD equivalent difference per month depending on how much I put my PC to sleep/turn off. 

 
If google is right, you're paying about 6 times what we are per kwh.  So my fairly modest machine would run you $210/year ($17.50/month), and with 3 monitors and 2 GPUs something in the $50/month realm seems about right.