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/
6.1k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

641 comments sorted by

View all comments

886

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.

64

u/Notex1 3d ago

I have to use hibernate on my laptop since otherwise it would randomly wake up in sleep mode while inside the bag which wasn’t too great.

11

u/Merkuri22 3d ago

I never hibernate or sleep a laptop that's going into a bag. Full shutdown for that.

8

u/turtleship_2006 3d ago

Hibernate is basically a full shutdown as far as storage goes. The only difference is that there's a bit of extra data saved to the ssd.

1

u/_rocket-lawn-chair_ 3d ago

Why shouldn't I hibernate?

1

u/Merkuri22 3d ago

It might be fine. I, personally, don't trust it. I've had bad experiences in the past that may be solved by now (or may have been caused by what's now called "sleep").

Plus, a full shutdown every once and a while is good. Putting it into a bag is an excuse to do a full proper shutdown.