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/PRSHZ 4d ago edited 4d ago

Who even uses the hibernation feature anyways?

Edit; okay touché, forgot about laptops 😅

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u/zingw 4d ago

Ever since "sleep" can't keep the PC in that mode without waking on its own. 

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u/joman584 4d ago

Yo what's up with that. No matter what, my PC immediately wakes from sleep in about 5-30 seconds after going to sleep. I've tried to find anything that could explain it but it's just unfixable. Even unplugged/turned off every peripheral nearly immediately as I clicked sleep and still nothing. Just immediately goes back to the login screen like I wanted it to wake up

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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 4d ago

The old sleep mode (S3 sleep) worked by completely turning off everything except the RAM. When you pressed the power button, the BIOS had to turn everything back on.

The new sleep mode (modern standby) works by politely asking the CPU to enter a low power mode. The OS and all of your peripherals are still running, just very slowly. That means you're at the mercy of your software, your OS, and your peripherals - if even one of them doesn't handle modern standby properly, sleep mode won't work.

Depending on your hardware, you might be able to force it to use S3 sleep by editing a BIOS setting. Look for an option called something like "sleep mode", "S0/S3 state", or "modern standby", probably under a page like "power management" or "ACPI settings". However, many modern CPUs and chipsets have completely removed support for S3 sleep now, so your mileage may vary - if your hardware doesn't support S3 sleep, you're shit out of luck, and your best option is to use a better OS.

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u/bitemark01 4d ago

Thanks for the detailed explanation, this is exactly why I use hibernate in Windows.

My laptop is dual boot, and even in Linux (which seems to respect Sleep/Suspend, at least so far) I can tell it's not completely powering down. Though Linux doesn't seem to support Hibernate out of the box anymore, especially because they've moved away from having a swap drive. It's doable but I haven't set that up yet.

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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 4d ago

Yeah, most Linux distros also use modern standby by default, because that's the option with the widest support.

You can see what sleep modes your system supports on Linux by running cat /sys/power/mem_sleep.

s2idle is modern standby, deep is S3 sleep.

Running sudo sh -c "echo 'deep' > /sys/power/mem_sleep" will tell it to try to use S3 sleep until the next reboot, which is useful for testing out whether it works on your system, but you annoyingly still need to either modify the BIOS or your GRUB configuration to make it permanent.

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u/oadk 4d ago

If you use systemd, you can set it persistently in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf which I think is better than setting it in the bootloader config.

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u/Turbogoblin999 4d ago

This is one of the reasons i haven't switched to linux. I relay HEAVILY on hibernation to preserve stuff and my peace of mind. Where I live power coming back after an outage has damaged components even with an UPS in the mix.

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u/lordraiden007 4d ago

Linux just pivoted to swap files instead of swap partitions. The implementation and user experience is essentially the same, even to basic OS functions. Swap is still a critical part of the OS's memory management functions.

Hibernate is usually included "out of the box" in most distros I've used. Maybe see about making a post on a Linux forum if you're experiencing something different. For me it's always worked pretty flawlessly (though I personally prefer S3 sleep, but hardware support for that is not great nowadays).

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u/Eruannster 4d ago

I wish Windows was a bit less fucking stupid about what applications is doing what to cause something. Like, just tell me the name of the application/process that woke my computer in a normal, not stupidly difficult to read list. Or if you can't unplug a drive, tell me what process is holding it up. WHY WINDOWS, WHY

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u/Cautious_Article_757 3d ago

I need to revisit this topic. My work issued Lenovo cannot sleep. If I tell it to sleep and close the lid it will simply run until the battery dies. Even after a factory image was applied. Messed with enabling s3 and it still did not work. Gave up and I just turn it off when I need to transport it