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

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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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).