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Total B.S. Don't believe it.
The OS spins the drive down anyway during idle times, unless you change Energy Saver prefs to disable that.

Yeah that's is B.S. the hard drive gets more wear from spinning constantly if you disable the "spin down hard disks when possible" setting than it would if you turned it on and off every day.
 
I am a complete idiot. Please explain to me what is the difference between "sleep" and "off." I always understood that "sleep" allowed a quick boot-up by keeping vital tasks running - keeping the computer "on." Thus wouldn't enabling sleep mode decrease the life a computer as compared to one that is turned "off" for long periods of inactivity?
 
I am a complete idiot. Please explain to me what is the difference between "sleep" and "off." I always understood that "sleep" allowed a quick boot-up by keeping vital tasks running - keeping the computer "on." Thus wouldn't enabling sleep mode decrease the life a computer as compared to one that is turned "off" for long periods of inactivity?

Its confusing. Sleep is basically disabling everything temporarily save for the CPU, when sleep is deactivated the CPU commands everything back to life, the battery still is active and running the CPU. When its off, everything is disabled. Not sure if thats perfect but over the years with various devices this is what I've come to learn, sleep is nice if your say switching classes in school or know you'll be using the computer shortly. Also its nice just for convience; wake up open the lid and everything is right where you left off :) Side note and kind of random to some of the other users, is it possible to run applications in the background while its in sleep? Like lets say Im torrenting can I shut the lid to save battery and let it continue torrenting? It disables wifi but I figured you might be able to change that..
 
I am a complete idiot. Please explain to me what is the difference between "sleep" and "off." I always understood that "sleep" allowed a quick boot-up by keeping vital tasks running - keeping the computer "on." Thus wouldn't enabling sleep mode decrease the life a computer as compared to one that is turned "off" for long periods of inactivity?
With sleep, your computer writes to hard drive the current state (contents of RAM, apps and windows that are open, etc.), then goes into sleep mode. When you awaken it, it simply restores the current state from the hard drive and you're right back where you were, with the same apps, windows, etc. as you left them.

When you shut down, you close all apps and documents, nothing from RAM is saved, and your system shuts down. Neither shutting down nor sleep will reduce the life of your computer.

Your Mac and Sleep Mode
Its confusing. Sleep is basically disabling everything temporarily save for the CPU, when sleep is deactivated the CPU commands everything back to life, the battery still is active and running the CPU.
It's really not confusing. Your CPU is not active at all during sleep, and isn't what awakens your system. A physical interrupt, such as opening the lid or clicking a mouse or pressing a key is what wakes your computer, not the CPU.
 
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