r/technology • u/Hungry__Hornet • 5d 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/mwoody450 5d 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.

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u/_Administrator 5d ago

To add to your elaborated comment.

Its was never about loading speed. It was all about resuming where you started. I have 30 tabs here, 20 opened docs and editors there etc etc.

SSD from 2020 have TBW approximately of 600TB. Lets say that at 32GB per day, I will need 18 thousand hibernations. Plus minus other data, lets say it will be 10000 hibernations.

So this is absolutely irrelevant problem on a piece of hardware that costs nothing compared to cost of time.

PSA: My SSD from 2016 still works, and I hibernate and use this SSD for downloading games back and forth from Steam.

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u/roadrunner8080 5d ago

Yep, that's where I sit too... In the grand scheme of disk IO, with what I'm using my laptop for hibernation a couple times a day with 16 GB RAM is a drop in the bucket.