If the computer is running and gets suddenly turned off by loss of power, what really happens? Is there damage that happens slowly or progressively over time or is it more of a risk that something might happen to the computer suddenly in any event?
In: Technology
Two major things happen, one to all computers, one to some.
For all computers, the loss of power happens at a random time and they may not have finished whatever operation they were currently doing. If this happened to involve reading or writing to a file, what’s actually written to storage and what’s in the file index may be out of sync. This can corrupt the files so, even when the computer starts back up, things may be busted. Some electrical components also exhibit unpredictable behavior at low voltage so they may do weird things as the power is failing.
For computers with hard disks, you also have a spinning disk that needs to be kept very carefully in sync with the physically moving read/write head. A literal disk crash is pretty rare with modern drives (old drives would literally have the head run into the disk surface) but you can still get weird effects if the drive is trying to write while the power is falling and the disk speed may be dropping.
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