Standby vs Hibernation

[DTSMAN]

I think I understand the basic difference being standby is just a low power mode and hibernation actually shuts it down and saves RAM info to the HDD.
What is optimum settings for a well used desktop a family of 4 shares frequently? We wore out one hard drive and would like the new one to last longer.
When using one or the other of these modes, how do I incorporate the use of turning off the monitor and turning off the hard drive in the power options? Should I?
Reccomendations?

Bo

Remember,
If the women don't find you handsome,
they should at least find you handy.
(Red Green)

http://www.redgreen.com

 

[linney]

Hard drives can last one day, or they can last many years, it is just the luck of the draw as it is with anything mechanical.

Whether you use Hibernation, Standby, or Always On, it is still a lottery.

I never use Hibernation, or Standby, my power setting are set to Alway On, I don't have it set to turn off drives or Monitor. I Defrag on average twice per week. I use the computer every day and only power down when leaving the house or going to bed. I have been lucky in that I have never needed to replace a faulty hard drive.

That is why I say it is all a matter of "luck".

 

[Glenn9999]

Probably the moral to any story like this (and I've heard one like this personally in the last day or two) is this: Always backup your data regularly so you'll have it in the event of such problems.

I'm waiting for the white paper entitled "Finding Employment in the Era of Occupational Irrelevancy

 

[DTSMAN]

I currently run like Linney, always on for everything, I back up to an old Dell I gave my daughter that has a second drive in it where I back up my files and run disk maintenance regularly.

Is hibernation and turning off the monitor and hard drive in power options redundant?? Is it redundant to do it if I enable standby?

-Standby
-Hibernate
-Turn Off Harddisk
-Turn Off Monitor
What is the optimum combination of these 4 for a home PC that is constantly used by a family of 4?
(someone is almost always on it except late at night till morning when in bed) Lets say I want to save electricity too and noone knows who is last so it stays on constantly with alot of downtime durning the day as well.

Bo

Remember,
If the women don't find you handsome,
they should at least find you handy.
(Red Green)

http://www.redgreen.com

 

[Glenn9999]

Okay, it seems some definitions are in order:

-Standby - stands down the system to a certain point (defined by the OS configuration - this can be anything from one or two devices to everything but the memory and CPU)
-Hibernate - saves the contents of memory to disk and then shuts down the computer.
-Turn Off Harddisk - powers down the hard disk alone.
-Turn Off Monitor - powers down the monitor alone.

Now, the last two options are generally useful only if the computer is in use periodically (like every 15 minutes). They are useful to set in stages along with the other two, but don't necessarily *have* to be set.

Standby is useful if you have the computer on and walk away, and want *most* of the computer powered down (see your settings, again). Hibernate only seems useful if you have a lot going on and *need* to shut the computer down without losing track of what you had going on - it really isn't all that interesting as a power saving option.

All these things have hardware and technical issues attached to them as well which may or may not be solved (for example my computer won't standby right now because of the mouse driver), or even solvable given the hardware (I had a hard drive once that wasn't smart to turn off that way). Other than that, the main question is what will work for you, given the options you have.

I'm waiting for the white paper entitled "Finding Employment in the Era of Occupational Irrelevancy

 

[linney]

It is probably of more use to a Laptop that might want to prolong battery life (charge).

If you disable Hibernation you get back some extra hard drive space too. 500+ MB in XP, I believe.

 

[DTSMAN]

So, Hibernation is there for laptops and not needed for desktops. That makes sense and I think I now remember hearing that once before.

Bo

Remember,
If the women don't find you handsome,
they should at least find you handy.
(Red Green)

http://www.redgreen.com

 

[phyrtech]

DTSMAN,

If you run a lot of hard drive intensive applications (video processing for example), then your best line of defense is regular defragmenting. The defragmenting process does a lot of reading and writing to the hard drive, however, studies show that having a low degree of fragmentation vastly reduces the total number of read and write procedures done during normal use.

Something to consider is what programs are running regularly. If you have a lot of applications running that even periodically write/read to/from the hard drive, you are increasing the number of times the hard drive has to spin up. By reducing your running set of applications, you can reduce the load on your hard drive.

I would also strongly encourage you to invest in a quality hard drive. There are a number of brands that I have gotten poor performance out of in terms of longevity. It is not always cost effective to purchase the cheapest hardware you can find.

Phyrstorm Technologies, Inc.

http://phyrtech.com

 

[hgate73]

For what it's worth, I personally prefer standby because of how quickly the computer comes back to life. Plus it doesn't as much to the HD, which is a bonus. But to each his own.

I was previously posting under "GeneralDzur" but hgate73 is my new username.