Is it bad or unhealthy to put my Mac to sleep?
I am wondering if it is bad or unhealthy to always put my Mac to sleep or should I shut it down instead? What I mean by putting it to sleep is that the display and hard drive are sleeping.
The reason for asking this question is I have heard from several computer literate people that sleeping the hard drive is not good for it.
Solution 1:
Anecdotally, the drives of 5 to 15 years ago would run longer if you never spun them down. When I managed servers - the drives failed less rapidly than the inexpensive hard drives that were in workstations (which typically spun down). It's not clear if we would have seen similar failure rates if we placed the higher priced (and presumably better built for the long run) drives in the workstations.
I have seen no credible studies that show any drive from the last 5 years lasting longer by disabling sleep. It's hard to imagine a case where you wouldn't want to have a computer sleep even if it were going to decrease the useful life of an inexpensive storage drive due to other components failing over time and the waste of energy.
We don't yet have good data on SSD wearing out either as OEM parts ordered from Apple or aftermarket SSD, but it will be interesting to see how they wear out due to write failures and if sleep writing of large RAM images will add up to enough writes to shorten the life of an SSD that otherwise would be healthy in the absence of storing sleep images.
Solution 2:
Laptops use a hybrid of sleep mode and hibernation by default: they both keep the RAM powered and write its contents to a sleep image.
The cells in SSDs can only be written to a limited number of times after which they become read-only. The write endurance of SSDs is often estimated as total bytes written (TBW), which is usually about 500-5000 times the capacity of the drives for high endurance SSDs.
If you had 8GB of RAM, half of it was written to a sleep image when going to sleep, and you put the computer to sleep 500 times per year for three years, it would be a total of about 6TB. For a 256GB SSD with a TBW of 200 times its capacity, that would be about 10% of the TBW.
That could be completely wrong though. I don't know any way to see how much data is written to the sleep image when going to sleep.
Related questions:
- On/Off vs. Sleep Mode
- Turning off hibernate on a MacBook Pro with an SSD
- Do MacBooks have a true "Hibernate" option?
Solution 3:
The main problem caused by putting macs to sleep is that the computer immediately writes all the data in RAM to the Hard drive. This means that if (as I've seen people do) you shut the lid of your Mac, then immediately start throwing it around, then there is a chance that your Hard drive could get damaged. However, so long as you are careful with it for a couple of minutes after putting it to sleep, then you should be fine. (In theory, the sudden motion sensor should park the drive heads before you do any damage, but I'm not sure how effective they are...)