Eh idling a PC for 10 hours would cost... 0.3Kw * 0.15 = 0.045 and that times 365 for a whole year would be about 16.40 (a little bit more 2 cents or so). Then for an average of 5 years that would be 82 euro's... For that you can buy a new drive easily.
And my last hard-drive lasted almost 8 years... then it died because of the PSU... So I'll trust myself on this one and just turn of the PC and buy a new drive with the money I saved by turning the system off ^^
I want to correct something.
I made a faulty calculation.
Ok lets be really really optimistic here and say that your computer runs 200watts whilst idling. Don't want to know what you're running but ok it's 200watts idle.
Then you'd be using 0.2 Killowatts per hour. This is what I missed; Per hour. And if you sleep 10 hours, thus letting it idle 10 hours. That would be 10 times 0.2 killowatts... Which is 2 Killowatts per time you let it idle 10 hours.
So that would be 0.2
Kw * 10
hours * 0.15
euro's = 0.30 euro's a night... And that times 365 days would add up to: 365*0.3 = 109.50 euro's... Over here you can buy a nice Raptor from that...
@Yeti: 0.3Killowatts.. That's 300 watts Idling... That's quite much for me
Ké perhaps a more unconservative calculation lets say you idle at 400watts (jeez...) 0.4*10*0.15*365 = 219 euro's per year! You can almost buy the new Velociraptor for that money over here! That would mean that if you turn of the computer for 10 hours a day instead of letting it idle those 10 hours you would be able to buy a Velociraptor 300GB's every year... After 3 years that would result into a killer RAID0 setup