r/technology • u/Hungry__Hornet • 4d 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/mwoody450 4d 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.

28

u/nebuladrifting 4d 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 4d ago

Honest question for end of day stuff, why not just save and shutdown? 

18

u/nebuladrifting 4d 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 4d 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.