I am curious as to what everybody's thoughts are regarding whether or not to keep an editing computer on 24/7 or to turn it off at night if not rendering.

From a few years ago the conventional wisdom seemed to be that the cycle of heating then cooling that occurs when a system is turned off each night and cranked back up in the morning was bad and shortened the life of a system more than leaving it on all the time.

Over the years I have opted for pretty much keeping my sys on 24/7. The current sys is 3 years old and so far no issues with anything wearing out.

I have a new system that will be here in about a week so I thought I would see what the current thinking is on this.

My online machine (desktop) stays on 24/7 but I restart it 1 time a week. My laptop is on from the time I get up til I go to bed. My edit machine is only on when I need it. No reason to leave it on if I'm not using it.

D.J. -- I don't turn mine off at night. I use the low-power sleep mode (Mac Pro desktop). I do a full power down once a week or so, same as Don. Also have surge protection on it of course, but no voltage regulation.

I went through this conversation with a guy that built computers. He swore it was better to leave them on. I built 2 computers side by side using same hardware. My neighbors had 3 failures in 8 years and mine 0. In fact my mom still uses it. The failures were video card, hard drive and I think a monitor. The makers of the motherboards claim that todays components do not suffer from cycles if you use clean power. They cycle their boards 140,000 times. You will get many answers, Although I turn mine on and off 4 to 5 times a day, I have never suffered a failure in the last 11 years of computers. 8 years D865PERL and 2 years P5QPRO. I choose to save on electricity, which in today's computers can be accomplished by sleep. The D865PERL left the fans and lights running, the P5QPRO goes quite dead in sleep mode, though I still shut mine completely off.

With seven to pick from in the house I tend to power-off when not in use.

Never switch off - haven't for years, but it's a good thing to restart/switch-off-and-on once in a while to clear data from RAM etc. Monitors need to be switched off because they die out soon otherwise. The sleep mode is handy too.

Sleep mode is probably the worst thing you can do at least for the power supply because power is still being fed but the power supply's fan is not active so its components actually get hotter than normal. I read this from an executive at OCZ (who also owns PC Power & Cooling - one of the most reliable PSUs).

I leave my work PC on in addition to its 14 drives and my home PC with its 15 drives. For me, having the computers on 99.9% of the time is required because I constantly login remotely to one from the other.

I shut my monitors off at night. Other than than, my primary machines are on 24/7. Never an issue. In fact, our entire workforce of about 850 PCs is on 24/7 as well as a our nearly 200 servers.

My computer is actually doing something when I'm about to leave it to idle for leaving it on 24/7: Distributed Computing.

I run SETI @ Home and Folding @ Home on my GPU and CPU while I just shut off the monitors and let it crunch the numbers. It's an excellent replacement for a space heater if you live somewhere cold. Overclocking helps more to heat up a room.

The answer can only come from you. Is it a fire hazard ? I would think not much but possible. Do you need to save on electricity ? Are you worried about security, hackers , someone getting to the keyboard, stored passwords etc. ? Does it need to stay on for remote purposes, customers ?

Do you have hibernate enabled, monitor, hard drive etc? Do you have a back up power supply and a motherboard capable of shutting itself down ? I have seen the power come on and go off several times from storms and would hate to see my computer browned out then back on then browned out repeatedly.

I don't think component wise there is an answer true enough to lean either way, but I save not only on the computer electricity but also the cable modem and APC.

So I think the answer would be personal needs and setup rather than component longevity.

I really don't see the reason to leave my home PC on if i am not working on it. I only switch it on when i arrive home and switch it off when I go to bed. My office laptop switches on when I get to work and off at 5.

Stelios

P.S. Editing is done on my home PC ( I am a part time videographer)

I shut down at the end of the day.

Because the AC needs to run when the machines are running (considerable amount of heat), shutting down the system saves a lot of power. Makes a significant difference in my electrical bill each month. And I haven't had any problems develop over the past few years.

Seems silly to me to leave any electronics on that waste a lot of power. I always turn off my computer when not using it and use my laptop instead of my workstation when possible. I only turn on my server when needed, and I also make sure proper cpu power saving is configured and make sure to use as little power as possible when idling, undervolting when possible especially if it does not affect performance. Electricity is expensive and all the pollution from producing it is best avoided when possible.

I have never experienced significant problems with any systems from powering them down and up. I would tend to think if anything that the greatest deterioration in computer hardware is likely to be from heat, which is only produced while the system is powered on. It is possible that cold/hot cycles are also bad for hardware, but I havent seen any evidence of it. Even if it was a bit worse for your hardware to turn it on and off, its unlikely that it would affect the working life of the hardware. Besides hard drives and maybe power supplies, 99% of the time pretty much all hardware I've been accustomed to becomes obsolete long before mechanical or electrical failures that come from use.

I built 2 computers side by side using same hardware. My neighbors had 3 failures in 8 years and mine 0. In fact my mom still uses it. The failures were video card, hard drive and I think a monitor.

Well, can you prove it was the switching on and off? I mean 8 years are a looooong time for a computer, I wouldn't trust any hard drive for that long, a video card usually dies because people never clean the fan and it overheats, and you can't leave a monitor on 24/7 because then you can throw it away after 2 years anyways.

My computer uses around 170W idle without the monitor, and when I leave it on 24/7, my electrical bill will be so much higher over the course of a few years that it absolutely equals the cost of a new computer - so I always switch it off and save the energy.

By the way I never have a computer longer than 3-4 years anyways, and so I never experienced any hardware failures once the machine was running smoothly in the beginning (I did experience getting faulty hardware from the shop, but of course returned it immediately)

After reading all of the posts on this thread my immediate action was a compromise. I am now turning the monitor off at night but still leaving the computer on. I still have a few days before my new computer arrives to decide what I will do with it.

My edit suite is the last part of a long building and has 3 sides exposed to the weather and a flat roof with next to no insulation. Damn cold in the winter. The two PCS in there run continually and provide enough heat to stop the room getting too cold. One runs continuously providing data to an internet mapping system, and has never been switched off . What does happen is the ones running continuously need cleaning out once or twice a year because of the dust they suck in!

No, I switch computers off, when not in use. Switched-off computers cannot be accessed by hackers or other persons trying to use your computer for all kinds of malpractice, including spyware and viruses!
John

When I used to leave mine on I'd have it run the SETI screen saver. It would process data collected by the Arecebo Radio Observatory, and look for possible signals that might indicate the presence of extra terrestrial intelligence.

When I was chief photographer at one of the local papers, I all of our photo department's computers running it, and the webmaster at the time set up many of the newsroom computers (all Macs) to do the same. I made a little sticker for one of the computers that read, "This Mac is looking for extraterrestrial life."

Hi:

Years ago, some claimed it better to keep systems running to protect the harddisks, the argument was that the harddisk suffers more wear and tear when spinning up at start than when running. I don't think this is really an issue today and I'm unsure if it ever was.

Unless you have rendering tasks, I see no reason to keep the systems on. Some systems have a problem waking up from sleep, in particular over longer periods. Restarting your system will make sure that swap and caches are cleaned up and kill any misbehaving processes.

BR, Erik

At one time hard drives would land the heads on a specially prepared/textured area of the disk when powered off but I think today they "unload" the heads, ie park them out of contact with the disk surface, so the wear and tear part is pretty irrelevant. What is still relevant is the effect of power cycling on the electronics, which is where the majority of disk failures originate.

Strange as it may sound, mechanical systems have fewer problems than the electronics that control them

Just a historical comment - in the days when disk drives were the size of refrigerators, it wasn't unheard of for the disk surface lubricant to wick in between the heads and the disk surface, and there were special start up routines that detected this and tried to vibrate the heads to break them loose - and sometimes the result was that the "stiction was great enough that the heads tore off of the suspensions. I've personally seen this happen.