Originally posted by: amdskip
Surely doesn't help out the drives. You shouldn't be hitting it. If it's locked up a machine can usually be shut down a tad softer by holding the power button.
I fail to see how this would be. Hitting the reset button does not power down the HDDs at all, so you really aren't causing any undue physical strain to the drives. On the other hand, holding the power button powers off the drives when perhaps the OS isn't ready for them to be powered off, and the drive heads may not be parked yet.
In my experience though, neither one really jeopardizes the drive itself, but you do risk data corruption if the OS hasn't finished writing data back to the drive at the time.