It is my undertsanding that when you do a full shutdown of your laptop the HDD is "parked", so the read/write arm thingamajig or whatever it is called cannot touch the disk surface. It is my understanding that this makes it very safe to move the laptop, etc., without causing damage to the HDD. My question is does sleep mode or hibernate mode do the same thing?
if I remember correctly, when you hibernate, and sleep, the only active part of your pc is memory, it's kept with power to hold the data. when you go to power settings in control panel you can see what options are selected for hibernate or sleep just check it out but i'm sure you can select to power down hdd's too.
Powering down and parking are two different things. Powering down does not lock the arm, so if your takeing your laptop in the car for example or drop it the hdd most likely will be damaged.
Smitty
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