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Having been through spiking power outages and lightning strikes, power outages can damage hardware. Usually the power supply serves as the sacrificial element and burns out before the overvoltage protection that's supposed to be on the secondary voltage circuits can kick in. Usual cure is PSU replacement and a disc scan to check for anything left over from an unclean shutdown. Surge strips need to be replaced every couple years to help prevent this kind of failure (MOVs degrade from doing their job and a 10 year old surge suppressor is just a power strip with extra lights).
– Fiasco Labs
Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 22:52
From this answer and the general trend of the discussion, it would seem that a computer suddenly losing power while in sleep mode would be absolutely benign because the HDD is already powered off and there are no components really drawing current that can be damaged by under- or over voltages. Does this seem accurate?
– Jonny
Commented Jun 25, 2015 at 14:15
@Jonny Losing power yes, probably. Power failure, not necessarily; as stated above, the power failure may very well be accompanied by power impurities that themselves can damage equipment. Note that ATX PSUs are almost never really shut down (they are only fully shut down when turned off with the switch at the back of the computer), in strong contrast to PC/XT/AT PSUs which had the power switch directly in line with the mains power and thus were fully turned off when the computer was turned off (up to the ability of the power switch to isolate the poles).
– user
Commented Nov 10, 2015 at 14:48

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