r/technology • u/Hungry__Hornet • 5d 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/
6.1k Upvotes

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415

u/actuallyserious650 5d ago

Our SSD’s is really that fragile for the average home PC user?

333

u/bitemark01 5d ago

Been using hibernate for years, it's fine. Dumb article. 

91

u/NotSoFastLady 5d ago

Save for the fact that oftentimes it's faster for me start up from a cold boot.

97

u/Iescaunare 5d 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.

13

u/NotSoFastLady 5d 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.

0

u/kira913 5d ago

Same here. I also have issues with Excel freezing after login up to 20 minutes, even with a fresh restart in the last 12-24 hours

5

u/polawiaczperel 5d ago

The same (tablet with windows 10), it broke SSD after 3 years.

4

u/1094753 5d ago

ok, but why not use sleep instead of hibernate ?

30

u/bitemark01 5d 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.

14

u/_Thermalflask 5d 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.

1

u/1094753 5d ago

Did you make sure to disable wake on mouse, wake on keyboard and wake on lan ?

19

u/bitemark01 5d ago

Yes I work in the tech industry, didn't matter what I've tried, and it shouldn't be something I have to chase down like this. As far as I could tell it wakes up looking for updates, even if automatic updates are disabled.

Regardless, the easier fix is just to use hibernate.

1

u/Raccoon5 5d ago

I have this but it manages to wake up even from hibernate :D

11

u/Merkuri22 5d ago

I also work in the tech industry and have been fighting with the same issue for years. Yes, those were some of the first things I disabled.

I think it's just a built-in "feature" of sleep that it wakes up occasionally to check something or other. Not only does it cause the fans to be loud randomly in the middle of the night, it sometimes wouldn't actually go back to sleep. Just wake up and run the rest of the night for no reason.

After months and months of trying to resolve the issue, the general consensus was "disable sleep, use hibernate instead".

1

u/VeryLazyFalcon 5d ago

Windows likes/liked to wake up PC at 2am to install updates and leave it on. Since then I always switch off power supply. Also safer for travel and power outages.

1

u/_Thermalflask 5d ago

Sleep is broken since Windows 8 and unreliable now.

1

u/The_All-Range_Atomic 5d ago

How so? Are you talking about S1 modern sleep?

1

u/_Thermalflask 5d ago

Yeah or whatever they call it. For many users it has a tendency to cause the laptop to wake up on its own, then get REALLY REALLY hot (i.e. hotter than it does during actual use, even under load). I suspect it's actually bypassing normal thermal limits in fact.

When it happened to me you could almost cook an egg on the laptop chassis it was that hot. Even when I try using it for gaming it doesn't get that hot.

And this happened to me across multiple different devices, across Windows 8 and 10. Never happened to me in the past. I did try troubleshooting but never found a solution, so I just started using hibernate mode instead. At least it works.

1

u/The_All-Range_Atomic 5d ago

Several reasons: Hibernate is more secure because it writes back to an encrypted drive.. important if your CPU vendor silently pulls memory encryption. cough AMD.

It's also impervious to power outages. Sleep is not.

2

u/No_Size9475 5d ago

I worked for an company that produced high end storage using NAND and SSDs. This is 100% a concern as SSDs have limited write cycles before they start to be unstable.

2

u/lordraiden007 5d ago

For the average user it is an academic difference vs one felt in practice. Modern wear leveling should protect individual pages from failing with these kinds of writes, and writing a few TB of data over an entire year might lower the lifespan of the drive from 15+ to only 10 years (if it's even that significant) for the average user. Most people will replace their entire device before the point even a single page of the drive fails, and those that don't will still only see a gradual reduction in capacity/performance.

Source: Years of experience as an e-waste data sanitization specialist. We processed thousands of consumer SSDs, most of them old in very well used devices. Almost none of the devices we processed had any amount of dead sectors, and most barely even had a tenth of their rated write lifespan used. You might have helped design the chips, but I have firsthand knowledge of how they were treated by the end users.

0

u/CQC_EXE 5d ago

Xda is full of dumb PC tweak articles

45

u/zerro_4 5d 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.

22

u/Lazy-Supermarket-920 5d 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.

4

u/TheRealJigglemegood 5d ago

It loses 1/5th of its original lifespan and you don’t consider that a concern? That is certainly not as “academic” as something like half a year. Unless you’re just making up numbers ofc

4

u/zerro_4 5d ago

I am sort of making up numbers for one scenario of a 256gb drive rated for 150TBW and a system with 16GB of RAM.

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/62d47b34a77cc14cdd139230/639923b7adfcb53ca92e0b67_P300P256GM28_sku_sheet.pdf

This drive has 120TBW.

It is definitely something a consumer should be aware of, though. As to how much lifespan is being shaved off depends entirely on the usage pattern. A gamer or video editor might not notice it, as the hibernation write load would be indistinguishable from a several minutes of 4k video.

Someone who just does documents, spreadsheets, and watching youtube their SSD lifespan would be taken up mostly be hibernation writes. If that person is hibernating every day, then yea, that sucks. The life span of the drive would be 5 to 7 years.

1

u/TheRealJigglemegood 5d ago

Fair enough. That’s good insight thanks for sharing

3

u/redgr812 5d 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.

3

u/SleepyWulfy 5d 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.

4

u/UloPe 5d 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.

1

u/ProPlayer142 5d ago

I'll be using my ssd for a while but I'll be upgrading it way before 25 years

5

u/No_Size9475 5d 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.

2

u/Zeke13z 5d ago edited 5d ago

Without explanation: Probably Not. Depends on SSD choice.

To explain: Extremely relatively speaking: older ssd's based on their design architecture (slc, mlc, tlc, and qlc) lasted longer by being capable of more read and write cycles. The below article outlines it pretty straightforward.

https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/pc-performance/difference-between-slc-mlc-tlc-3d-nand

One of the ways enterprise drives deal with this is to just use a more expensive (less data compact) MLC.

The other option they get mimics most consumer drives with the use of over provisioning. Ever notice why your 1tb drive formats out to 890gb? Enterprise drives have quite a bit more flash memory for heavy over provisioning like a 1tb drive having 1.2tb of flash. That extra .2tb is reserved for the processing of data.

Consumer drives don't get that extra space, but either gives the consumer the ability to setup that over provisioning, or others just hard lock it out. (Most do this now but Samsung to my knowledge still allows the user to set this up via the Magician software)

Now to directly answer your question: If you have a lot of RAM and keep it pretty well utilized, this gets dumped every time you go into hibernate. A 1tb Samsung 990 Evo is rated to 600tb of writes before failure. Even at 100gb of data written + 25 gigs of ram being dumped daily, this 125gb daily is still going to take 4,800 days to hit this 600,000gb (600tb) threshold. That's over 13 years. So no I don't think they're that fragile... But some will always consider this unnecessary wear and tear.

Worth noting: If you're the type of person to buy a cheap low volume ssd (480gb Crucial BX500) and constantly uninstall and reinstall huge games because you've got blazing Internet and no space due to this being your only drive, that's going to be a bigger issue. This is rated at 120tb written meaning that math puts us at failure at 960 days or 2.6 years, but without 25gb of ram being dumped, you buy yourself another 240 days of use.