[EHaskins]

I corrupted a drive once by holding the power button. Luckly I'm paranoid about loosign data so I had backups.

You should only do that as a last resort.

If you have it configured to shutdown properly, go into sleep, ect., thats fine, but killing it is bad.

EDIT: Someone menitioned USB drives getting corrupted, I had that happen once too, but that wasn't backed up.