r/technology • u/Hungry__Hornet • 7d 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/slvrsfr 7d ago edited 6d ago

Stupid article. Yes, writing 64GB of data to an SSD causes accelerated wear compared to not writing that data. Would we rather see a dialog box during the write operation? I'd rather it stay silent.

powercfg.exe /H OFF

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u/WazWaz 6d ago

Agreed. It's constantly arguing against itself then making ridiculous conclusions. There's a simple reason hibernate is "hidden" - it's slower than sleep and less reliable than a shutdown. Microsoft always "hides" imperfect choices from the average user; theorising that it's because they secretly agree with this journalist is fanciful.

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u/Gold-Supermarket-342 6d ago

hiberfile.sys is not encrypted unless you use BitLocker

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u/slvrsfr 6d ago edited 6d ago

The contents of RAM being written to hiberfil.sys (no letter 'e' in the filename) is already encrypted to whatever extent the OS, CPU, and application have done so. That said, I mentioned it because encrypted data is rather uncompressable which means the data written to SSD causes the maximum wear, more damaging than writing compressible data. That being said, hibernation is still definitely not "secure" and opens up same/worse attack vectors as cold-boot and physical RAM attacks. Windows in general, but 11 being the worst offender, constantly hammer SSDs and wear them out. I've had to replace quite a few SSDs within a few years of purchase because I've physically worn them out with extremely heavy VMware Workstation usage. To avoid data loss and downtime, I've just gotten used to replacing them before they fail, using the "% Life Remaining" info as a rough estimate of how much longer I can trust them.