So I put it to sleep earlier, it then ran Lowton battery in my bag, turned itself on for a bit and then shutdown. I caught it as it was shutting down. Hopefully I didn't Fuck the hard drive (NJ) .

I never (ok, I did once) put my desktop into hibernate mode (and it took AGES to resume unlike my laptop) but I do usually hibernate my laptop to save battery (strange as I have an SSD, would have thought it would be quick). Not sure how much is consumes in standby but I assume more than hibernate.

Hibernate should turn your computer off. You should be able to turn it off at the wall and recover fine. In theory all it does it copy the contents of your RAM to your disk.

Suspend usually turns everything off except for keeping the RAM powered.

It keeps more than the RAM going. Maybe depends on the sleep state. I can charge my phone from my computer while it's sleeping, and of course wake it up from the mouse/keyboard. And I think there are even sleep states that keep the fans going. I'm sure I've had to change something on one of my computers to stop the fans when it sleeps.

Nonplussed jackals.

Power downs due to exhausting the battery WILL kill the HDD. I have a dead Asus here to prove it. The distaff side, despite warnings to the contrary*, was in the habit of hitting the power button instead of doing a proper shutdown. How this could have even occurred (see *) could be discussed at length for the better part of a fortnight or nine.