[G4] Sleep vs Shutdown

[perry at cynic.org]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 01:02:53AM -0400, Alex wrote:
> I think that the original idea was (stress of 1 boot) = (wear and tear 
> of running uninterruptedly for 8 hours). And I suspect it came from 
> someone's hand-waving, rather than a serious study.

To actually do such a question justice requires some serious application
of statistics (with the Dread MTBF word all over it).

Let's just say that the act of spinning up a harddrive is more stressful
(to the drive) than days worth of running. (Yes, that applies to "put
drive to sleep when idle" too. It may save you energy, but not necessarily
money. :-)
For motherboards and their chips, it's thermal change (expansion/shrinking
due to heat changes) that's primarily the "stress" that makes them fail.
The chips themselves, once burned in, fail quite rarely on their own.

In other words, there's no simple answer, just rules of thumb.

Cheers
  -- perry