Comments
alwayswinning7892 t1_ixzn3wi wrote
I've heard with the older style platter hard drives which spun and had arms which read the data it was possible to physically damage them if the read heads did not have time to "park" correctly but I'm not sure if this was really true.
icefire555 t1_ixzpw0y wrote
That is not correct. I didn't down vote you though. The heads on a drive move in and out along the disk. But not up and down. Even today hard drives are in use and it's more a concern of stopping it mid write than anything else.
icefire555 t1_ixzpmij wrote
This is correct ^
gazdxxx t1_iy1ljq0 wrote
You don't take it seriously until it happens to you. I've had filesystem corruption happen recently on a Linux machine when it crashed in the middle of writing to the X11 lockfile. This caused my graphical interface to completely stop working. It's less common with modern filesystems but it can still happen.
idontchooseanid t1_iy10e42 wrote
It comes from the old era where computers didn't have tactile push buttons with proper signalling in the motherboard to initiate a shutdown and eventually cut the power. They had a good old switch. When you opened the switch it opened the power circuit which caused an immediate shutdown. When you closed the switch you got power. Just like a light bulb.
With DOS or Commodore systems this wasn't a huge deal. The only possible scenario to lose data is when you deliberately shut your computer immediately after commanding to write data. You would know you lose data because you knew the command hasn't completed the operation yet. With old consumer systems like those there could only be a single application running which took over the entire computer for itself. So the only way to lose it would be your deliberate action by closing the switch while it is saving.
Nowadays we don't have computers with a switch but when they introduced the first versions of OS/2, Windows etc. people still had computers with a switch. This is a big deal since those OSes introduced multitasking. Now there is always a supervisor program, i.e. the OS, running the other programs by switching them around really really fast. Moreover they started to do things at the background for efficiency reasons. Therefore user's ability to guess when a disk write happens has been disappeared. So suddenly shutting down a computer with a modern OS started to carry a risk. Since people gain habits while using machinery, they have to be reminded of the new behavior. Many people were using DOS systems and it was normal / habitual to just turn the computer off from the switch.
Due to those reasons early Windows versions displayed a message after a proper shutdown to inform the user to switch the computer off: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160419-00/?p=93315
Gl0balCD t1_iy0hg3q wrote
It clears volatile memory without saving anything to non-volatile memory (hard drive). This can result in corrupted files and lost data
BlowjobPete t1_ixzd2n4 wrote
When people say it's bad to turn off the computer via the power button, they're not talking about tapping the button and letting windows go through the shutdown process. Instead, they mean the act of pressing and holding the power button to turn the PC off, which cuts the power to the computer and turns it off suddenly.
If the power to the computer is cut suddenly, files may become corrupted. If your computer was in the middle of writing information to the hard drive, this may cause that information to not be stored correctly, meaning some programs may not work properly in the future.
Also, many older computers didn't tell windows to shut down when the power button was pressed. On an older computer, pressing the power button just immediately shuts the power off.