What is the difference between your system going into hibernation and turning off the hard disks.
Sleep is just where is starts up after the set time when you hit a button, I assumed but I don't know how the other two are different.
Sleep, Hibernate, and Turn Off Hard Disks.
Shutting down your hard drive is just the hard drive shutting down. You PC stays on and usable. If you need something on your hard drive, it powers back up and gives it to you. It's a way to shut down devices to save power without actually powering down.
Going to sleep, I think, is everything 'shutting down'. The monitor turns off, the hard drive shuts down, etc. So all devices are shut down. But the PC is still on. The CPU is still 'on' and stuff. You can wake your PC up and go back to work in less time than if the PC actually turned off. Going to sleep still drains laptop power because it keeps the most basic life support stuff on.
Hibernating is saving the current state of the PC to the hard drive and then shutting down completely. You can then boot up and the PC will resume right where you left off. This is normally used on laptops as a fail safe measure. If you are working on something, but your battery dies, instead of just spontaniously shutting down (causing you to lose whatever you were working on), it saves the state of everything, then shuts down. That way, when you plug in and boot up, you are right back to where you were, and you lost no data.
Going to sleep, I think, is everything 'shutting down'. The monitor turns off, the hard drive shuts down, etc. So all devices are shut down. But the PC is still on. The CPU is still 'on' and stuff. You can wake your PC up and go back to work in less time than if the PC actually turned off. Going to sleep still drains laptop power because it keeps the most basic life support stuff on.
Hibernating is saving the current state of the PC to the hard drive and then shutting down completely. You can then boot up and the PC will resume right where you left off. This is normally used on laptops as a fail safe measure. If you are working on something, but your battery dies, instead of just spontaniously shutting down (causing you to lose whatever you were working on), it saves the state of everything, then shuts down. That way, when you plug in and boot up, you are right back to where you were, and you lost no data.