[G4] Sleep: Good or Bad?

[Perry The Cynic]

--On Thursday, February 5, 2004 9:40 PM -0500 Kevin Willis 
<res19rmg at verizon.net> wrote:

> 	I have  a G4/400 running Jaguar and I was debating whether or not to set
> it up to go to sleep.  I was running Jag. on a 8600 before, so I was
> unable to use the sleep feature.  Now I wonder if it would  be a good
> idea.
> 	I usually fire my G4 up when I get home from work at 3:00 or 4:00 PM and
> leave it on till  I go to  bed at 10:00 or 11:00.  Would the sleep
> feature extend the life of my hard drive as well as the rest of the
> components in the system?  Or does it make a difference at all?

The most stressful moments in your Mac's life are actually being turned on 
(particularly) or off (somewhat less so). Running for a few hours, vs. 
being asleep for those few hours, doesn't make much of a difference (unless 
you have extreme environmental conditions - I'm talking arctic, desert, or 
rain forest here).

The advantages of sleep over "awake" is power savings and no noise. The 
disadvantage is that your Mac won't respond on the network.

The advantages of sleep over "shut down" is that wake-up is much faster 
than startup, you keep (almost) all state, and wake-up is slightly less 
stressful than startup. The drawback is that a sleeping Mac draws (a very 
small amount of) power.

One note on hard drives: by far the most stressful thing for a hard drive 
is spin-up. Frequently spinning a drive down and back up does *not* make it 
live longer; if anything, it stresses it out more. Of course, assuming you 
have the energy saver panel set to turn the drive off on inactivity, 
sleeping won't make a difference here. Spinning a drive down does save some 
energy and a bit of noise.

On the whole, I don't think there's any significant effect on longevity 
either way in your case. If anything, you'd gain (if only very little) if 
you'd put your Mac to sleep overnight instead of shutting it down.

Cheers
  -- perry
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Perry The Cynic                                             perry at cynic.org
To a blind optimist, an optimistic realist must seem like an Accursed Cynic.
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