There is no reason to be over cautious, but powering-off electronic devices reduces the wear and saves some energy.

There are a few exceptions in the IT .. e.g. some harddisks were designed to run at 24/7 and frequent power cycles increased the wear, ...

With a recording interface it is not much different to lets say: TV, computer, HiFi, ...

Simply do as you like, but I personally would turn devices off if you do not use them for more than lets say 3+ hours.

Depends also on the amount of devices, if you have a studio with a lot of devices, then powering off might be done after a workday, but not for a 1-2h lunch break in the middle of the day.

My PC is a multi-purpose solution: recording, office, gaming, internet browsing.
I only turn it off over night or when having an outside appointment.
But I differentiate .. key components that need to be on are on.
Components that are only required for recording are being powered-on on demand.

For this I am using three power outlet strip's ..
One the 1st the usual stuff is connected to.
The 2nd one has additional components for office work and light in the evening, chargers and stuff like that.
The 3rd one has everything which I need for recording my amp. The amp, power for effects, multieffects, tube mic, etc.

By this I can very efficiently turn on and off what I need ...
And stuff that I do not need often can stay powered-off, then I have a) no wear, b) do not waste energy for no reason
and the room stays cooler.

Thanks for your insight!

Yes it was a USB interface on Windows 10. It's hard to give you an accurate answer on latency since it depends on so many factors, sample rate and buffer size to begin with... and I was switching sample rates often so the values were constantly changing. What I can tell you is that the values were certainly not impressive at all. It was never a problem for me because I do very little recording and a lot of mixing/mastering, but I remember being disappointed to see that the latency values were generally higher than my former interface (a Roland Octa-Capture, which I still have and works great, it's dedicated to a drum kit recording now).

A word of warning: I replaced my Clarett by the UFX II because the Clarett was faulty. The main outputs started emitting loud pops and cracks for a second or two each time I was changing sample rates. On top of that, I had random DAW crashes that I never had with the Roland, and I had to work at high buffer sizes otherwise I got the infamous audio glitches, which seemed really weird considering that I have a pretty powerful computer (AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-core @ 3,79 GHz, RAM 64 GB, fast SSDs...)

The good news is that every Focusrite interface bought after Jan 2018 is under a 36 months warranty so Focusrite offered to send a new one after receiving mine. But I had enough of the Focusrite driver unreliability and that is why I decided to go with RME because my main criteria was reliability.

I can't say much about the UFX II since I've been using it only 1,5 days. But here's a few things I can already say:

I didn't like the Focusrite Control software, the Total Mix FX program is 1000 times better.
Focusrite customer service is extremely slow (then again, that might be true for every manufacturer during Covid crisis)
The UFX II doesn't look as good as the beautiful Clarett

My first choice was initially the Antelope Discrete 8 but I read too many bad things about its unreliability on Windows. That is why I went with RME.

Not sure what "crazy insane specs" you are referring to but virtually every interface with a big name has good preamps and converters. It all comes down to reliability and features in the end. I don't know if you're into cars but to make an analogy, to me Focusrite is like Aston Martin: it's beautiful, it sounds good but it's not as efficient as you would expect in real life and it's not reliable. RME is like BMW or Porsche: real powerful engineering and ergonomics, and reliable even though it might not look as impressive. On ly time will tell whether I'm right but I'm confident

No there was no irony whatsoever in my comment, sorry if my quote editing made you feel that way. I realise it's for me to decide when to switch the devices off, I guess I was just surprised that there was such a difference in temperature on the outer case compared to my other devices.

Focusrite .. a little bit off-topic, but I can contribute to this ...

6-7y ago I was using the Focusrite flagship Liquid Saffire 56.
The handling of the mixer software was tbh a pain and I was always struggeling with it.
The FW drivers caused issues and I lost around 30m of a recording because during 4h operation of all sudden an ASIO buffersize of 256 was not sufficient anymore. Troubleshooting caused another lost 1h.
The manual was also unsatisfactory in that regards.
The LED's on the device were not accurate I read in a review from a user who measured it.
The poti's which are being used were only useable in the last ~20%.

The later USB products (Scarlet) were even worse in terms of that now even loopback operation was not supported anymore for a long time in the whole (!) USB product line.

With RME you do not have all of these hassles and once understood TM FX has the best logic operating concept.
Its a real gift to be able so save all the settings digitally in snapshots and also Workspace Quick select is very helpful.

Finally do not forget all the useful toolset around like DIGIcheck and TM FX Remote, that you get for free. Alone for such tools you normally would have to pay a lot of money if you compare with other VST on the market. And DIGIcheck data is very accurate because you get it from the FPGA inside of the recording interface.

After getting my 1st RME product (UFX) RME felt much more like a professional product where you felt from the beginning that "engineers who know" spend a lot of time to make things right.

That said .. I wouldn't be impressed simply by a few dB more here or there its the overall package that you get what really counts and reliability and operability for the daily business.

> are a perfectly fine way into home recording for the price

Sometimes this consumer stuff is already quite expensive ... if you stay at this level maybe fine.
But usually people evolve and get higher demands and then you can run into limitations very quickly.

Problem: you need or want to sell  the consumer stuff then and realize you do not get much money for this stuff.

If you are starter, then you do not have the overview over products and do not know how much better
a product from RME can be with all the benefits we know ..

I will be sticking with my 15 year old fireface400.  i dont think any other company has the same driver stability and overall performance.  thanks for all the feedback on the focusrite stuff.  i am no longer considering the clarett 8pre

Yes for sure.. and now that I am getting better at and more familiar with TOTAL MIX (huge thanks to ramses on here) I am going to be sticking with RME.  My shit is so rock solid and stable, it's just silly.  Not even a BLIP of stability problem with my old ass fireface 400.