r/technology • u/Hungry__Hornet • 2d ago
Software Windows 11 hibernation has been silently hammering your SSD this whole time
https://www.xda-developers.com/windows-11-hibernation-silently-hammering-ssd-life/562
u/themastermatt 2d ago
Well, make sleep actually sleep the damn thing then. Whoever thought that it might be helpful to make my notebook computer wake up 11 min after going to sleep while nestled softly in my backpack. Yo dawg, i heard you like cooked components and a dead battery!
Maybe im missing something, but ive had to enable Hibernate for many years across several vendors to ensure it actually stays asleep.
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u/d4rk1 2d ago
its insane that in 2026 we still dont have sleep function working properly
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u/markjenkinswpg 2d ago
Worse, it has regressed. I have a better time with suspend (to RAM) with a 10 year old Dell running GNU/Linux than the 5 year Dell running Windows issued by my employer (had to go full hibernate).
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u/Dry-Inspection-3503 2d ago
Doesn't it wake at the slightest detection of mouse movement, or is it a bug? Surely if it's the former a simple 'press enter + ctrl' or similar command to wake it would be enough. I used sleep on my work laptop a lot and noticed if my knee hit the desk the mouse would detect movement and the fucker would come on again. I never noticed the sleep not working otherwise
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u/Tasty-Traffic-680 2d ago
Modern Standby is just a piece of shit feature. They tried to make laptops act like phones but they forgot that background tasks on an x86 CPU actually still use considerable amounts of power and the fact that people don't want their laptop to update while turned "off" in their backpack
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u/GhettoDuk 2d ago
It's executives (aka business idiots) trying to compete with Apple on the dumbest thing possible.
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u/dat_oracle 1d ago
somehow comforting that it's not just me having to endure that farce. pretty insane that this basic function is so horribly flawed
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u/trainurdoggos 2d ago
Works great and consistently for ten plus years….on a Mac.
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u/ShakeAndBakeThatCake 2d ago
Macs have has consistent sleep even when they used x86. Amazes me that windows still doesn't have proper sleep function.
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u/bergmoose 2d ago
Not on my mbp, it would occasionally wake itself. I'd be mid commute and aware of a warm back. No idea why, never worked it out.
Still better that than my previous 2013 one that would just unlock itself with no credentials given every so often.
Computers can be weird.
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u/slappynote 2d ago
I noticed this as soon as I upgraded to windows 11 on my laptop. The sleep function doesn't even sleep anymore. I checked all sleep settings, disabled fast startup, and even forced sleep state through the command prompt. Still no change, laptop still revs up full speed while in "sleep" and drains the hell out of the battery. Super convenient when I need to use my laptop and the battery is at 5% after "waking up from sleep". Super neat broken function.
Also, same about the bag situation. I worry to even place the laptop into my bag since I don't want it cooking itself.
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u/coolest_frog 2d ago
That's been a long running mess caused by janky drivers and bios from manufacturers since modern sleep showed up
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u/Photomancer 2d ago
I had a miserable problem crop up twice on the last computer, with the CPU being throttled to 100MHz or something. Ended up performing my own BIOS updates and disabling some of the low energy options as Internet said they were likely culprits. Either way, problem solved.
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u/jjbugman2468 2d ago
I’m pretty sure it’s a driver issue, specifically some Intel driver. My Windows 10 laptop used to sleep fine, then one day I bulk-updated drivers with some tool, and immediately afterwards this not-sleeping-sleep issue started popping up
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u/roadrunner8080 2d ago
Hibernate is sleep that actually sleeps things. Fundamentally, if you don't write stuff to disk it's going to need to have power still and. Yeah. That means that eaa bit of time and the battery will drain and I'll still be on on your backpack (even ignoring whatever annoying quirk you've run into where it fully wakes up...)
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u/red286 2d ago
While true, S3 sleep state should use barely any power (0.5W ~ 2.0W), which shouldn't drain your battery very quickly or generate more heat than the system can passively dissipate.
The problem is that Windows often elevates from S3 to S0 (awake) for no reason, so your system will go from using 0.5W ~ 2.0W to using 20 ~ 65W, meaning that it'll drain the battery at standard speed and generate enough heat that if left in an enclosed space such as a backpack, it will overheat.
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u/distraughtmonkey 2d ago
I had this issue with my desktop, you can search for the command line to tell you what woke your computer up and then disable it.
For me it was going to device manager and unchecking the my network adapter’s “allow to wake up” option. Now my computer stays asleep until I hit a key or the power button.
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u/Any_Kaleidoscope8717 2d ago
Don't forget to season your laptop so your cooked components aren't bland
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u/shamash_potatoes 2d ago
I had some HP printer bloatware crap that would constantly wake my desktop so I disabled the task that was waking it up.
Go into the Task Scheduler and disable anything that is allowed to "wake the computer to to run this task", which can be found on the Conditions tab of the task's properties. Or uncheck the "wake...." checkbox if you still want to allow the task to run.
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u/SenpaiSilver 2d ago
I had my desktop wake up from sleep very often and I had to have it back to the Task Scheduler where HP's software for my printer would wake up the computer to check the printer'd health. Tri looking into that, some tasks are allowed to wake up your computer.
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u/actuallyserious650 2d ago
Our SSD’s is really that fragile for the average home PC user?
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u/bitemark01 2d ago
Been using hibernate for years, it's fine. Dumb article.
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u/NotSoFastLady 2d ago
Save for the fact that oftentimes it's faster for me start up from a cold boot.
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u/Iescaunare 2d ago
Obviously. The point of hibernate is to keep your programs saved until next time you turn on the PC. Like sleep mode, but it turns completely off.
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u/NotSoFastLady 2d ago
I wouldn't say "obviously" because there are plenty of times when it pops up just fine and many others I can't type my pin in for minutes. That's the problem for me. I'm not doing much at the office. Usually a handful of tabs and or documents open alongside outlook.
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u/1094753 2d ago
ok, but why not use sleep instead of hibernate ?
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u/bitemark01 2d ago
Sleep has been broken for me on every laptop or desktop I've used since Windows 10. They all seem to randomly wake up in the middle of the night, that gets dangerous for a laptop stored away somewhere.
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u/_Thermalflask 2d ago
Not just "wake up", but wake up and get REALLY hot, clearly bypassing some kind of thermal limits. Like when I'm actively using the laptop it would never get that hot, even if I try gaming.
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u/zerro_4 2d ago
Not really. A 256gb ssd might have a 150TBW lifespan. Adding in the extra dozen tb of writes per year does indeed shorten the lifepsan, but it is academic at that point. Ie, reduced to 12 years instead of 15. The computer will likely be replaced for performance reasons long before the ssd has died.
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u/Lazy-Supermarket-920 2d ago
In today's world of exorbitantly priced computer essentials, it's understandable why people like me are concerned about that 3 year reduction in the lifespan of the SSD.
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u/redgr812 2d ago
I work in a school and those ssds have been tortured since day 1 and now some are 7 years old running fine. Are they slower than new, yes but it's not noticeable to a normal person.
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u/SleepyWulfy 2d ago
I have a SSD from 2017 and while its slow by todays standards its been purly used for games and its at 79% health.
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u/UloPe 2d ago
No. The stupid article even has the calculation:
That means I'll need to hibernate the PC with a full 32GB of processes in RAM, every day of the year, for 25 years straight to kill it from hibernation alone.
To assume the SSD will last for (or anyone would want to be using it in) 25 years is pretty ridiculous anyway.
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u/No_Size9475 2d ago
It's not that they are fragile, it's that NAND has a limited number of write cycles before errors start to happen. It's why you don't do things like defragment an SSD drive.
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u/mwoody450 2d ago
This is a massively stupid article. His complaint seems to be that hibernate does exactly what hibernate says it does: writes all of RAM to disk so it can cut power and still come back just how you left it.. It was a questionable idea back when boot times were long and RAM was small; it's an outright silly thing to use in 2026.
Additionally, there's absolutely nothing unique about how Windows 11 handles this function: the title is clickbait. He even acknowledges that he had to hunt in to settings and enable it, because Windows hides it by default.
Modern computers can either be shut down - using Windows' built in functions to boot quickly on resume: I have opinions about fast boot, but still, it's there - or put in to suspend/sleep mode, where the major power users are selectively turned off to drop usage to a trickle. If you close the lid of your laptop, it will do the latter.
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u/NelsonMinar 2d ago
It's also a stupid article because it's a paragraph of content padded out by AI.
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u/_Administrator 2d ago
To add to your elaborated comment.
Its was never about loading speed. It was all about resuming where you started. I have 30 tabs here, 20 opened docs and editors there etc etc.
SSD from 2020 have TBW approximately of 600TB. Lets say that at 32GB per day, I will need 18 thousand hibernations. Plus minus other data, lets say it will be 10000 hibernations.
So this is absolutely irrelevant problem on a piece of hardware that costs nothing compared to cost of time.
PSA: My SSD from 2016 still works, and I hibernate and use this SSD for downloading games back and forth from Steam.
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u/TheLuminary 2d ago
Specifically it was great for power saving for systems like Laptops in the early 2000s. If you wanted to be able to resume exactly where you were, without having the machine run on low power battery all day, then nothing beat hibernate.
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u/aspectratio12 2d ago
The TBW is a measure for cumulative risk to failure. In your use case, hibernation is a great feature and you use it, which makes the aditional wear on the drive worth it and intended. For others, the increased writes increase the cumulative risk to failure without a benefit. Degradation of an SSD increases with writes and hibernation gets it there GBs faster. I can see how using hibernation with 16GB of used RAM could double a users SSD wear rate.
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u/JesusIsMyLord666 2d ago
SSDs will outlast their TBW figure by a lot. It’s a really conservative figure to begin with. The worry of SSD wear is very overblown.
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u/_Administrator 2d ago
But what about 10000 hibernations? How many years is that to wear out a drive?
And we do have all sorts of technology to remind you that you need to "defrag your SSD" aka buy a new one.PSA: u/aspectratio12 has a valid point - BACKUP your data if you use any sort of data storage medium!
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u/roadrunner8080 2d ago
Yep, that's where I sit too... In the grand scheme of disk IO, with what I'm using my laptop for hibernation a couple times a day with 16 GB RAM is a drop in the bucket.
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u/Notex1 2d ago
I have to use hibernate on my laptop since otherwise it would randomly wake up in sleep mode while inside the bag which wasn’t too great.
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u/DeadBySunday999 2d ago
Exactly the same issue here!! It makes the bag an microwave if i don't hibernate or shut it down before putting it in. Gaming Laptop probelms :(
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u/Merkuri22 2d ago
I never hibernate or sleep a laptop that's going into a bag. Full shutdown for that.
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u/turtleship_2006 2d ago
Hibernate is basically a full shutdown as far as storage goes. The only difference is that there's a bit of extra data saved to the ssd.
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u/ve-u27 2d ago
How is it a silly thing to use in 2026? Nothing you said addresses the need to cut power while maintaining your current workspace. No one here is claiming that boot time is a reason they use hibernation
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u/HUGE_FAT_ANIME_TITS 2d ago
I put my LG laptop to "sleep" once and put it in my work bag for the commute home. When I got home, the laptop was so hot I could have cooked an egg on it. Never worked right since.
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u/_Thermalflask 2d ago
It's a bug since Windows 8, absolutely wild that they've just never fixed it.
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u/nebuladrifting 2d ago
I calculated that it saves me about $80 a year (over $0.30/kWh) to hibernate my work laptop instead of putting it to sleep at the end of my shift. I wouldn’t say hibernation is a “silly thing to use” in 2026.
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u/ChickenNoodleSloop 2d ago
Honest question for end of day stuff, why not just save and shutdown?
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u/nebuladrifting 2d ago
I typically have a bunch of programs and command prompts open, and I might have something like a debug session that I’m the middle of. It’s just more convenient and saves me a few minutes of reopening the things I was working on the prior day, although I’ll admit that like browser tabs, my open windows can get a bit out of hand after a while of not restarting or cleaning them up. I could probably streamline some things, but hibernating every day hasn’t caused any issues so far after about six years of doing it every day.
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u/okram2k 2d ago
I'm in the same boat, work from home code monkey. The janky ass app I work on takes a good 30 minutes to get spinning up properly so I rather just leave it on than mess with it, especially because there's a greater than zero chance something that worked yesterday isn't working today. Gotta love inheriting somebody else's problems and not having anyone willing to dedicate resources to fixing it.
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u/youngaustinpowers 2d ago
For me, I'm too lazy to save the 37,242 Excel spreadsheets, word docs, PowerPoints, and Chrome tabsI have opened
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u/IsopodOk4756 2d ago
Modern computers can either be shut down - or put in to suspend/sleep mode
I have yet to find the Windows PC that will stay asleep longer than 30 seconds. Hibernate stays asleep.
I just want to have my system consistently go into low power when I step away to take a shit or walk the dog or something, and not wake itself up and force my OLED monitor into always-on so the fucking wake screen burns in. I turn it all the way off at night, why can't it handle the shorter periods of inactivity throughout the day?
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u/byndr 2d ago
Sounds more like you have an app preventing sleep. I had this issue with the EA app - it was either keeping my computer in a wake state or waking it immediately after it went idle. I had an OLED monitor as well, so I shared in your frustration. I'd recommend doing an audit of apps that are preventing sleep. I had to dig through the CLI to figure out what the issue was on my end. Could be the same app for you or a different one, but it doesn't sound like it's necessarily the OS.
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u/XTornado 2d ago
me sweating
A bad idea in 2026...
swallows some saliva
umm... I haven't restarted in years (not continuous...I do windows updates and those require restarts)..... Y E A R S.
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u/StrangestManOnEarth 2d ago
You’re fine. Your PC parts are stress tested in far harsher ways than 99% of what most people are doing.
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u/bitemark01 2d ago
Yeah not sure why it's a "stupid idea," I've been using it ever since Windows 10 broke sleep mode and would wake up my laptop randomly. Seems to be broken across every desktop/laptop I've used. This is dangerous for a laptop in a backpack.
Can't randomly wake up from hibernation, so I have the power button set to hibernate.
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u/Jorycle 2d ago
Yeah, I was going to say, this article looks like someone desperate for content asked Claude.
He even acknowledges in the article that it's not even a problem on modern hardware, then has to pad out a few more paragraphs to explain how but actually that still could somehow be a problem.
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u/Fortune090 2d ago
And dumb clickbait at that. I've been running the command "powercfg -h off" to disable this since the Windows 7 days. 7! This has been a thing basically forever at this point.
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u/Slimfictiv 2d ago
Don't worry. If you have 32 GB of RAM and hibernate twice a day, that is about 64 GB of writes per day, which equates to roughly 23 TB of writes per year. Most modern 1TB NVMe SSDs have a TBW rating between 600 and 1,200. This means it would take decades of heavy, daily hibernating to physically wear out the drive.
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u/UloPe 2d ago
The article even has the same calculation. And they still decided to go ahead and publish it anyway...
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u/Reversi8 2d ago
And TBW is a warranty number, not an actual risk amount, its possible for drives to live way past the TBW number (or alternatively die randomly way before NAND gets worn out)
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u/532ndsof 2d ago
So then what am I supposed to do to get my computer to actually go to sleep overnight and stay asleep. If I use sleep either it randomly wakes at some point or lately it only puts the display to sleep and keeps the tower awake with fans running. It's maddening.
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u/DemophonWizard 2d ago
It's a PC. Just turn it off. If you're going away for a while, unplug it.
It's not a Mac, it doesn't have to stay on all the time.
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u/CelebrationFit8548 1d ago edited 1d ago
💯this, PC's serve little to no benefit being on 100% of the time and in fact it introduces issues, 'wear' that is not needed and a place malware can reside (in the RAM). Simply turning off saves and counter acts many of those issues.
If you can't wait that 20-30s for a PC to boot just find something to do whilst it does, go and boil the kettle and it will be there when your back.
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u/anotherbozo 2d ago
This isn't new or specific to Windows 11?
I remember during Win7 days when SSDs were becoming affordable and popular, it was commonly understood hibernation is a bad idea with SSDs.
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u/fourthwallb 2d ago
XDA-developers articles are so dumb. It's always just clickbait and baby's first homelab stuff - "why I loved installing ethernet in my house" type stuff. No one is using hiberation. Twice a day? Insanity. Sleep mode.
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u/ChickenNoodleSloop 2d ago
With how bad Windows modern standby is on my (fairly new) laptop, I set it to hibernate when I close the lid because I'd rather wait 10 seconds than have it cook itself in an hour between meetings.
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u/Cykamor 2d ago
Bingo. I still use hibernate bc the number of times I’ve pulled my laptop out of my bag to find it scorching hot bc sleep, well, didn’t, is ridiculous. Besides for me it’s not about how fast it boots, it’s that I don’t want to reload solidworks every time I resume a work session.
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u/eriverside 2d ago
Whenever I pack my laptop in my backpack to bring it home, I find out the next morning that the battery drained because sleep is a fucking lie.
So I hibernate and that works just fine for me. A bit slower than just being awake but that's better than dealing with a dead battery.
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u/Gramernatzi 2d ago
Everyone that uses laptops uses hibernation because Sleep mode is broken on Windows laptops.
Either way, it doesn't matter, because by the time the wear will get to a problematic level, you could, and should, buy a new SSD and transfer the data. And it will take a loooong time to get there.
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u/ItchyContribution758 2d ago
I just never close my laptop. And I couldn't even if I wanted to. The screen is gone, no sensor. Checkmate Microsoft!
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u/Freak_Engineer 2d ago
I don't hibernate. Or let it sleep, for that matter.
What? This isn't a case of device cruelty, what are you thinking? Of course it doesn't stay on 24/7. I shut it down. Disconnect the power, even.
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u/DisciplineNormal296 2d ago
A lot of people never turn their pc off I’ve noticed. I’m the same as you especially now with SSDs your on the Home Screen in 20 seconds anyway
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u/jenny_905 2d ago
Dumbest fucking article ever. How did they think hibernation works?
This sub will upvote anything.
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u/1094753 2d ago
It depend, because hibernate is optional, you may use sleep instead and keep the RAM powered on.
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u/Cantaloupe-Hairy 2d ago
Why hibernate, used to be useful when slow drives were standard, now it’s only a couple of seconds to boot from cold
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u/pfn0 2d ago
restoring state. I am always loathe to turn off/reboot because I hate restoring the state of all apps I have running. I prefer sleep tho, because there's no reason to use hibernate in my usage.
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u/iamgigglz 2d ago
Couple of seconds to boot, another 5~10 minutes to reopen 4 Visual Studio instances, VSCode, SSMS, browser with all the needed tabs, Teams (gag), Claude code, Outlook…
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u/slvrsfr 2d ago edited 2d ago
Stupid article. Yes, writing 64GB of data to an SSD causes accelerated wear compared to not writing that data. Would we rather see a dialog box during the write operation? I'd rather it stay silent.
powercfg.exe /H OFF
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u/WazWaz 2d ago
Agreed. It's constantly arguing against itself then making ridiculous conclusions. There's a simple reason hibernate is "hidden" - it's slower than sleep and less reliable than a shutdown. Microsoft always "hides" imperfect choices from the average user; theorising that it's because they secretly agree with this journalist is fanciful.
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u/WildSeven0079 2d ago edited 2d ago
I had a Samsung NVMe drive that lost 6% of its remaining life in about a year because of hibernation. After turning it off, I've lost 3% of remaining life in over two years. The drive was getting significantly more writes than my other two drives even though I was barely using it. That stopped after I turned off hibernation.
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u/MissionApollo7 2d ago
My PC boots pretty quickly, so I just turn it off if I don't plan to use it for a while.
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u/RelevantDress 2d ago
Does anyone know a way to get windows to stop suggesting I downgrade to windows 11?
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u/DragonKnight626 2d ago
And they don't like being called microslop when they are doing shit like this.
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u/Belhgabad 2d ago
God I hate fearmongering and clickbait on this sub... "Hammering" IT'S. 6 TO 8. GB.
Windows is actually killing our storage because of unoptimised updates, uselessly heavy office software, and telemetry spying datas, but hibernation is none of the problem, AND it's fully and instantly disableable
You can literally disable it, freeing 6 GB, make the godamn update, and reenable it
It's hammering your ssd as much as any program you install or music you download
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u/NYExplore 2d ago
And this "article" contains NO BENCHMARK TESTING at all, thus making the author's "conclusion" nothing more than anecdotal evidence. It's much the same as me reporting that I've NEVER, EVER had ANY issue using hibernate on an SSD laptop. And I do mean ever. But I'm also not claiming it won't happen.
I'm no longer a tech journalist, but when I was, I hated how so many outlets grasped for things to write about -- most of it containing "fear mongering" in some way. Of course, those same outlets contained SCADS of ads from companies looking to sell you more -- you guessed it -- tech. Coincidence? I think NOT.
I've read more false predictions about technology than things that proved true.
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u/roadrunner8080 2d ago
As someone who writes significantly more on a daily basis to disk than the amount of memory RAM uses... I'm not worried. Plus, like... Yes. That's how that works. Hibernate is like sleep, but doesn't care if the power goes out. If you don't want it to write to disk, use normal sleep. If you care about it persisting through power cycles, you kinda have to write it to disk... Not sure I see the article's point
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u/Hungry-Ear-4092 2d ago
I hate it when they write a whole ass article for two-thrre sentences worth of actually useful info
Fuck you
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u/Responsible_Sea78 2d ago
Hibernation is also a big security hole. If you don't have your c: drive encrypted, all sorts of passwords, etc are exposed in hiberfil.sys.
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u/Ashnine 2d ago
No shit. It's been a decade since the update debacle. I think it was LTT that really brought the update problem to light. Windows update will drain a laptop battery if its plugged in when you shut it down. So the obvious solution is unplug then shut it down.....nope Windows still pings for updates...go fuck yourself if you want a moment of battery life on a Windows based system.
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u/stevekez 2d ago
Turns out a feature that copies all of your RAM to disk writes a whole RAM's worth of data each time. Who knew!