Sleep or Shutdown? Macbook Air

Checco said:

Here is more of what I see:
I can't tell the exact frequency at which it occurs, but the fans and HDD can be heard running (the room has to be quiet to hear it). The screen doesn't come on and I've never heard it play a sound, for example the time announcement. It almost seems like a periodic interrupt to perform some housekeeping functions, staying on for a minute or two and then back down to sleep. Another observation is that when I wake it after a few hours of sleep, I find new mail already in the Inbox (Gmail in browser), so something had to have been going on. Am going to try and Google it now.

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If your iMac is "cold" and you cannpt hear anything (especially if it has a traditional spinning HD)...then it is certainly sleeping.

What OS version is your iMac running?

- Nick

pigoo3 said:

- Firstly...when the computer is put to sleep...the hard drive does stop spinning.

- Secondly...(ignoring energy consumption)...the way to get the most "life" (hours/days/years) out of a hard drive is for it to NEVER stop spinning. Starting a hard drive from zero rpm's is when most of the wear & tear occurs.

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So in Sleep does the HD actually stop, because your second statement doesn't mesh with your second? I am genuinely interested.

pigoo3 said:

Also "technically" starting a computer "cold" (shut down state) does put more wear & tear on the hard drive in the long run. It has to go thru the complete booting process when booting...versus not having to when waking from sleep.


The biggest downside to shutting a computer down (versus sleep)...is it takes more time before you are able to use the computer. With a "sleeping computer"...you can use it almost instantly.

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1. That may well be true, at least in theory. But I've had my Mini since the end of 2007 (Dec.) and shut it down at least 6 days a week, sometimes seven. If it ever dies, I won't know that this practice contributed to its demise, but I can testify that it has not caused a problem yet, nearly at its 6th birthday.

2. Easily solved by a strategic start up. Go microwave something and come back.

pigoo3 said:

If your iMac is "cold" and you cannpt hear anything (especially if it has a traditional spinning HD)...then it is certainly sleeping.

What OS version is your iMac running?

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Running 10.9 and traditional HDD. In post #19 I outlined what the reason seems to be and an initial test seems to have confirmed it. I disabled "Wake for network access" this morning at around 8.00 local time and entered sleep a few minutes later. Having returned to my Mac at 16.15, no new emails were listed in Gmail (Safari). Clicking on Inbox showed I actually had a few in there, the first from as early as 8.56 this morning. Seems like it's now remaining asleep!

toMACsh said:

1. That may well be true, at least in theory. But I've had my Mini since the end of 2007 (Dec.) and shut it down at least 6 days a week, sometimes seven. If it ever dies, I won't know that this practice contributed to its demise, but I can testify that it has not caused a problem yet, nearly at its 6th birthday.

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Very interesting. How long do you typically run it each day?

toMACsh said:

2. Easily solved by a strategic start up. Go microwave something and come back.

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Patience is a virtue!

At work we have Macs with an enterprise software on them managed through a central console. According to the console, we have Macs that were set up in March, that are waiting for a software update that only applies on a reboot.

They've been waiting since March.

Sleep during the day, power-off at the end of the day.

dotdotdot said:

So in Sleep does the HD actually stop,

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Yes...the hard drive stops spinning while sleeping (as I already mentioned).

dotdotdot said:

because your second statement doesn't mesh with your second? I am genuinely interested.

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They're not supposed to "mesh". They are totally independent & separate statements.

- Nck

toMACsh said:

1. That may well be true, at least in theory. But I've had my Mini since the end of 2007 (Dec.) and shut it down at least 6 days a week, sometimes seven. If it ever dies, I won't know that this practice contributed to its demise, but I can testify that it has not caused a problem yet, nearly at its 6th birthday.

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That's why I said that the difference is more a laboratory "experiment thing"...and may not translate to significant differences in real life (more days/weeks/months, etc.).

toMACsh said:

2. Easily solved by a strategic start up. Go microwave something and come back.

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"Easily solved" if you're not in a hurry.

As I stated above. If someone is in a hurry (rushing out the door)...but wants to check e-mail, send e-mail, get the weather report, etc....quickly. Waiting the 2 minutes or so for the computer to boot can feel like an eternity.

This is why sleeping a computer can be more beneficial for some folks.

- Nick

p.s. Now if someone has an SSD (instead of a traditional HD)...then boot times will be much less.

Checco said:

Very interesting. How long do you typically run it each day?

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Weekdays, it gets turned on at about 3PM or so and off around 9PM. On weekends, the startup occurs at 8 or 9 AM.

Patience is a virtue!

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Tell that to this guy...
Story in our paper yesterday: A guy parks at a meter at 4:56PM and plugs the meter for one hour, the maximum. The meter only needs to be fed until 6PM, so he figures he's safe. He returns at about 6PM and finds a parking ticket marked 5:58 PM, and no meter reader in sight.

Assuming that the meter keeps time accurately, he could have avoided the ticket by simply sitting in his car until 5PM before feeding the meter and walking away.

toMACsh said:

Weekdays, it gets turned on at about 3PM or so and off around 9PM. On weekends, the startup occurs at 8 or 9 AM.

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That's a decent life then. Probably a combination of your type of use and having a disk that's on the upper end of the life expectancy curve. I'd certainly be happy to get that from each HDD...but having said that, I hope your backups are current as it is getting along!

toMACsh said:

Tell that to this guy...
Story in our paper yesterday: A guy parks at a meter at 4:56PM and plugs the meter for one hour, the maximum. The meter only needs to be fed until 6PM, so he figures he's safe. He returns at about 6PM and finds a parking ticket marked 5:58 PM, and no meter reader in sight.

Assuming that the meter keeps time accurately, he could have avoided the ticket by simply sitting in his car until 5PM before feeding the meter and walking away.

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True! Probably would be fairly accurate over an hour, but he did made a fair assumption I'd think, what are the odds of being caught within that 4 mins? Quite an inflexible meter reader as well! Assuming expiry time is displayed, that is.

Not exactly a hijack of this thread but a lot of the posts in here were related to wear and tear on HDDs. For laptops, I'm more concerned with battery life (Which if it was covered in the thread and I missed it, I apologize) and what is the best process for getting the most life out of the battery considering that it's more difficult to replace than the HDD. Sleep mode, full shutdown, leaving it plugged in, making sure to unplug it with every full charge, etc...

Are there some best practices out there on that?

Lithium batteries like to stay topped off, don't like deep discharges. So, leave it plugged in whenever possible, sleep or shutdown. Apple suggests a full discharge once a month, but that's not for the battery, it's for the calibration software that reports the state of the battery.

And ALL lithium batteries start to decay two years after manufacture (not time in service, manufacture). At first the decay is very slight, but it deepens over time. Eventually, no matter what you do, you'll need to replace the battery.

MikeM said:

Are there some best practices out there on that?

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Yes. Discussed here on Mac-Forums at least 1000x! Maybe I exaggerate. But it's been discussed many many times.

In fact...click on the "Battery" link in my signature for more info.

MikeM said:

and what is the best process for getting the most life out of the battery considering that it's more difficult to replace than the HDD.

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With Apple laptops (since around 2009/2010)...changing the hard drive or the battery is about equally as difficult/easy. And with a laptop battery costing about $129+...and a 500gig hard drive costing under $60 dollars. I would much prefer to replace the HD than the battery (based on replacement costs).

- Nick