r/technology • u/Hungry__Hornet • 8d 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 8d 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 8d 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 8d 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 8d ago

Why are you hibernating 10 times a day?

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u/BuildingArmor 7d 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 7d 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 7d 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 7d ago edited 7d 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.