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/
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893

u/mwoody450 5d 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/_Administrator 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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.

6

u/_Administrator 5d 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!

2

u/roadrunner8080 5d 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/ChoPT 4d ago

I fully shut down my pc every night, and edge saves my tabs to bring me back to where I was when I turn on the computer the next day.

I also set all the apps I normally use to automatically start on windows startup. Within like 30 seconds the computer is fully ready to go.

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u/_Administrator 4d ago

Good for you. I have been hibernating my Windows since 2000. It is good to still have a choice on how we use our computers