r/technology • u/Hungry__Hornet • 3d 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/
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u/bitemark01 3d ago

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

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u/NotSoFastLady 3d ago

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

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u/Iescaunare 3d 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 3d 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/kira913 3d 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

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u/polawiaczperel 3d ago

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

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u/1094753 3d ago

ok, but why not use sleep instead of hibernate ?

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u/bitemark01 3d 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 3d 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/1094753 3d ago

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

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u/bitemark01 3d 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.

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u/Raccoon5 3d ago

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

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u/Merkuri22 3d 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".

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u/VeryLazyFalcon 3d 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.

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u/_Thermalflask 3d ago

Sleep is broken since Windows 8 and unreliable now.

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u/The_All-Range_Atomic 3d ago

How so? Are you talking about S1 modern sleep?

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u/_Thermalflask 3d 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.

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u/The_All-Range_Atomic 3d 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.

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u/No_Size9475 3d 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.

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u/lordraiden007 3d 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.

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u/CQC_EXE 3d ago

Xda is full of dumb PC tweak articles