Put HD to sleep? 13inch MBP

[gregrose]

Hey everyone, somewhat new to mac now. In the Energy Saving settings should I have the 'put hd to sleep' button checked or unchecked? I know with it checked perserves power, but ive read that its bad to do, just wondering if i can get some experts to tell me what i should do.

thanks

 

[movieboy23]

OP,

There's absolutely nothing wrong with checking that option in the Energy Saver preferences pane. All that option will do is put the HD to sleep if the HD has been out of use for a given period of time (ordinarily that defaults to 10 min but if you have your computer sleep settings set to longer, then it should abide by those defaults).

Choosing this option will not cause unnecessary wear and tear on the drive and you won't risk losing your data. The option is really useful for when you leave your computer to complete a different task and you want the computer to save as much of the battery as possible and spin down the drive so only the minimal power draw from the battery is being used by the logic board. The only detriment to choosing this option would be if you have the sleep setting set extremely low so every time you have to come back to your computer and wake it from sleep, the HD spins up again and eats a little more into your battery life as it requires more power to spin back up from sleep than it does if your HD were continually spinning.

Hope that answers your question.

 

[incandenza]

I agree that there is no problem with turning it on. However, in my experience it doesn't matter anyway, because the hard drive is never idle for long enough to sleep. It would only actually sleep if you leave the machine on with almost no applications running. An open browser, etc. will usually hit the disk occasionally, preventing it from sleeping.

Of course, with a laptop in most cases you just close the lid when you stop using it (or at least I do), making the whole thing irrelevant.