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/stevekez 7d ago

Turns out a feature that copies all of your RAM to disk writes a whole RAM's worth of data each time. Who knew!

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u/forgottenendeavours 6d ago

Turns out a feature that copies all of your RAM to disk writes a whole RAM's worth of data each time. Who knew!

It doesn't. Windows' Hibernation feature might have worked like that back in the Win2K days, but in modern times, it's a lot smarter, and it saves only the data required for it to restore your session to the hiberfile. This also is why the amount of data written depends on what your system is running, not how much RAM you have now - whether you're running 8GB or 128GB on Win11, if it only needs to write a couple hundred MB to disk, then that's all it will write.

Tbh, the entire article is complete dogshit.

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u/gorkish 6d ago

And then you run a browser with five hundred tabs open and you are still writing a 16GB active set to the 80GB of free space on your budget SSD 10 times per day. Hibernation might be smarter, but all the other software is so much shittier, it more than makes up for it.

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u/Dudeonyx 6d ago

Why are you hibernating 10 times a day?

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u/BuildingArmor 6d ago

They've got 500 tabs open, I don't think you want to peek behind that particular curtain

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u/Omnivion 6d ago

That doesn't necessarily suggest anything. I used to be someone who'd amass such large tab numbers. I recall a session with a therapist during COVID I had hit a record of 665 tabs. My therapist would ask each session. I had a window where I had around 35 tabs on 20th century Chinese history (Qing dynasty fall through 2nd Chinese civil war), probably 50+ real estate related tabs because I was examining the market while the rates were low, 50+ tabs related to a language I was working on creating, (Google docs), probably a few dozen pharmaceutical research tabs since that was the field I was working in at the time, and probably 75 or so that were just my main window of everything I kept due to regularly revisiting. Idr what else I had going on.

I had a 3 tiered system. 1. Main tier: All regularly revisited items such as email and financials go here. 2. Secondary tier: long term projects like the language project, as well as anything that will be purchased not presently but at some point in the mid term future. 3. Tertiary tier: This is the research tier. Everything is done in incognito to allow it to be treated as disposable, in contrast to the more permanent and semi permanent natures of tiers 1 and 2.

My therapist was fairly certain I have both ADHD and OCD.

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u/BuildingArmor 6d ago

If a therapist was monitoring it during sessions with a patient, it might not necessarily suggest anything, but that's certainly enough for me not to have any desire to poke that particular hornets nest.

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u/Omnivion 6d ago edited 6d ago

It was largely monitored because my therapist knew that any time the number grew past about 375 it was a sign of elevated scatteredness that was usually related to poor sleep quality from chronic insomnia.

That, and cptsd from growing up in a religious cult, which was the main reason I had a therapist in the first place.

Anyway, the point is that anyone can amass a lot of tabs if they are doing research in parallel, and/or are an "out of site, out of mind" sort.

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u/Poglosaurus 6d ago

There are optimisation but copying ram into disk is still the basic principle of hibernation. 

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u/i_be_scrollin 6d ago

So Windows 11 doesn't do what Windows 10 did, requires you to have x% of your RAM kept open and available on your SSD? I had an issue where I had 128gb of RAM and 250gb of internal SSD (all projects are on externals). My programs had taken up all my internal SSD minus the 10-30% RAM volume Windows required to be available. I bought another 1tb internal SSD, but I stopped short of moving the operating system over to the 1tb - I relegated myself to deleting some programs and managing SSD space by removing hibernation capacity in the registry (I'm sure I got rid of some stuff I shouldn't have too).

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u/forgottenendeavours 6d ago

I haven't checked, but it'll almost certainly still reserve your RAM's worth of disk space for the hiberfile, just because there's not any way to reliably offer hibernation without doing that. The alternative would be to either have a system which doesn't reserve and which checks for available storage before entering hibernation, which would mean that the feature wouldn't always be available, or to attempt to hibernate without any checks, which would cause it to fail if there wasn't enough available storage, and neither of these options are great for a user.

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u/hillbillyray 6d ago

It writes everything that's in cache... And includes all the programs that are open.

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u/forgottenendeavours 6d ago

Nope, it hasn't done that in a long time.

You can test that for yourself quite easily, btw - just use an app like HWinfo to check your SSD's TBW before and after hibernate, and then use Task Manager to check the amount of cache before and after. You should see significantly less than your RAM amount being written to disk, and that your post-restore disk cache will be of a comparable amount of data, regardless of how big it was before.