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I am wondering if it is bad or unhealthy to always put my Mac to sleep or should I shut it down instead? What I mean by putting it to sleep is that the display and hard drive are sleeping.
The reason for asking this question is I have heard from several computer literate people that sleeping the hard drive is not good for it.
No - you can choose whichever sleep options you prefer and have a very healthy Mac and storage.
Anecdotally, the drives of 5 to 15 years ago would run longer if you never spun them down. When I managed servers - the drives failed less rapidly than the inexpensive hard drives that were in workstations (which typically spun down). It's not clear if we would have seen similar failure rates if we placed the higher priced (and presumably better built for the long run) drives in the workstations.
I have seen no credible studies that show any drive from the last 5 years lasting longer by disabling sleep. It's hard to imagine a case where you wouldn't want to have a computer sleep even if it were going to decrease the useful life of an inexpensive storage drive due to other components failing over time and the waste of energy.
In 2012, I didn't have good data on SSD wearing out either as OEM parts ordered from Apple or aftermarket SSD, but it will be interesting to see how they wear out due to write failures and if sleep writing of large RAM images will add up to enough writes to shorten the life of an SSD that otherwise would be healthy in the absence of storing sleep images.
In 2023 I have no good data to add to this on the SSD front. The cheaper OEM fail at a much higher rate than the premium SSD, but even the premium seem to be optimized for less cost to manufacture and slightly shorter life spans. Apple drives seem to be the cream of the crop in terms of lifetime and durability, but even those can fail prematurely or due to exhaustion of writes.
HDD still in 2023 are very cheap to replace and the failure rates don't seem to correlate in any meaningful way with anything other than very hard physical shocks when operating or prolonged temperatures 25+ degrees F higher than the operating limits the vendor supplies.
Set your devices to sleep if it makes you feel good or the lights don't blink or not based on energy usage on your portables is my advice. Control the temperature and humidity and acceleration/shocks for the best chance of avoiding a repair or replacement.
Laptops use a hybrid of sleep mode and hibernation by default: they both keep the RAM powered and write its contents to a sleep image.
The cells in SSDs can only be written to a limited number of times after which they become read-only. The write endurance of SSDs is often estimated as total bytes written (TBW), which is usually about 500-5000 times the capacity of the drives for high endurance SSDs.
If you had 8GB of RAM, half of it was written to a sleep image when going to sleep, and you put the computer to sleep 500 times per year for three years, it would be a total of about 6TB. For a 256GB SSD with a TBW of 200 times its capacity, that would be about 10% of the TBW.
That could be completely wrong though. I don't know any way to see how much data is written to the sleep image when going to sleep.
Related questions:
The main problem caused by putting macs to sleep is that the computer immediately writes all the data in RAM to the Hard drive. This means that if (as I've seen people do) you shut the lid of your Mac, then immediately start throwing it around, then there is a chance that your Hard drive could get damaged. However, so long as you are careful with it for a couple of minutes after putting it to sleep, then you should be fine. (In theory, the sudden motion sensor should park the drive heads before you do any damage, but I'm not sure how effective they are...)
First off, the "sleep" of a Mac differs from those of most other computers; Macs don't write the content of the entire RAM to the disk when you put it to sleep, it rather deactivates power supply to almost every component of the computer, except the RAM, so that, when the Mac awakes again, it never erased the RAM and kept it's content.
So it depends on what you call "bad/unhealthy", because the Mac is still powered, just not consuming as much. Meaning that Macbooks will lose battery life while sleeping, but it still may take up to weeks until it runs dry, depending on how much life the battery had when you put the Macbook to sleep.
My guess is that those "computer literate" people only knew about the sleep function of most other computers; those write the content of the RAM onto the disk when putting to sleep, and read it from the disk into the RAM when they awake. First: this may cause massive fragmentation for the disk. Second: SSDs lose life when writing on them, so this in particular may indeed be not healthy for them. Third: There is a risk of damaging the HDD while it is writing and you bump the laptop (however, this is not sleep related, and there should be technics put into the laptop to prevent this anyway).
Personally, I never really shut down my Macbook, except when I know I'm not going to use it any time soon. So again, I never shut down my Macbook, only just closing it.
EDIT: Just learned that portable Macs do both by default, that is keeping the RAM powered and saving the content to disk.
So yeah, the guys told you that technically are right, but as I see it, it's as unhealthy/bad for your drive as, well, using it for anything else.
