I believe I have definitive evidence from my day job... If you are after hard drive reliability leave it on 24/7. In my industry the burdened cost of labor is $340,000 per 1800 hours, the cost of electricity is insignificant, the cost of a hard drive is insignificant, the cost of a computer is insignificant... the cost of lost productivity is astronomical, the cost of lost Intellectual Property (IP) can bankrupt. If you are after maximum reliability, keep in mind that backups are an integral part of quickly restoring capability. To achieve that we require all lab computers to have a ups, dual hard drives that are cloned weekly, and all IP backed up twice, with one copy stored in another secured physical location. Hardware is replaced every 3 years maximum.
Yep, that's what I do, then I click on TWSStart as soon as it's fired up and that launches TWS, Qoutetracker, News & Chat while I go make some coffee. Works great.
If this were TRUE... it would be widely known... therefore it is FALSE. PC type hardware will last longest if kept at a stable temperature... I have been advised this by Electrical Engineers. The wear and tear on your system from constant shut down... And the dramatic changes in hardware temperature... Will most likely SHORTEN the lifespan of your PCs. Also... No ** serious business ** ever shuts down it's core systems... Because it's just too costly in terms of time wasted.
Used to live in Florida, Cocoa Beach. One morning after what is a small time thunder storm in Midwest, i lost a modem due to electricity surge. I went to CircuitCity on Merritt Island to get a replacement..............SOLD OUT. I was lucky, only lost a modem, many others lost the pc etc. (i did use surge protectors also) Now i do this.............i leave the modem and the router connected to a surge protector and always on overnight, 24/7. The separate pc's are also connected to separate surge protectors. At end of trading the trading pc's are turned off and the surge protectors are flipped off then the juice is unplugged at the wall. Better safe than sorry. Overkill? probably, but pc's are not cheap, and i want to be ready to trade, not fixing a pc.
re: "Servers are made with hardware that is designed to run 24/7" There is truth to this. Somewhere there is a Seagate disk drive reliability study. In that they mention the reliability of "consumer" grade drives vs. "server" grade drives. The MTBF, for one, is quite a bit different, so is the cost.
I stopped turning my computers off after a buddy studying computer science told me that it's better to just leave them running like businesses do. With regard to enterprise class hardware being the only hardware capable of running 24/7, my last three machines have been Best available AMD Best available Western Digital HDs Best Available Asus motherboard I've left them running for 9 years in a row. No problems. This hardware isn't enterprise class (at least I don't think it would be designated as such - it's retail stuff). I now back up everything to external HD.
i have 2 Dell computers that have been running 24X7 since Sept 2002 and have had no problems at all. They are both P4's. i also have 2 other Dells that I shut off each evening after trading hours. These were purchased Oct 2004. No problems yet. You decide.