[CrashHD]

If I need to shut one down, I go into the menu to force it to reboot, and then I unplug it at the "Welcome, powering on" screen. Basically, I try to unplug it very early in the boot process, when if it's doing anything disk at all it should be reading it read-only still anyway.

This is almost certainly not necessary, but it's how I do it.

 

[CrashHD]

Killing the circuit breaker is the same as pulling the plug

yes

or losing power due to an outage.

no.

Outages are pretty commonly accompanied by surges and/or sags both in the moment of failure, and when the power is restored. They are usually not sufficient in magnitude to damage most appliances, but at the least they are not good, and it is not the same as turning off via switch/breaker/power cord.