Sleeping

[macstarter]

I've read a lot here recently about "putting the mac to sleep". Since I've gotten my Mac i have turned it off when I wasn't using it. I'm generally on it for several hours most evenings.

Last night I just put it to sleep. I noticed that my external hard drive light kept slowly pulsing all night.

Will this effect the life of the external hard drive?
Should I use the sleep mode or turn it off for the way I use it?

Thanks in advance for your replies!

 

[osxx]

Been using the sleep mode for years and my external drive did fail at the 4 yr mark but if you read many forums at around that time frame they can fail anyway.

 

[toMACsh]

Most anecdotal evidence suggests that letting it sleep instead of shutting down does not have any adverse effect on the computer. Put another way, that won't affect it adversely.

 

[macstarter]

Okay--Thanks for the input. I appreciate it.

 

[chas_m]

The hard drive is in fact PARKED when the computer is asleep, so there is NO correlation between sleeping and hard drive failure at all.

Apple recommends you sleep the machine unless you are going to be away from it for a prolonged period of time (which IMO would mean more than 48 hours, with common-sense caveats if you live in lightning/tornado/bad weather country).