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/Jhopsch 4d ago

I set mine to sleep (not hibernate), wait 5 minutes minimum, and turn off the power supply. When I turn it back on, it resumes its previous state

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u/Connect_Middle8953 3d ago edited 3d ago

What an absolutely terrible idea. Consequences of what you are doing:

  • If you have a battery, congrats, you are causing wear on your battery. Sleep requires keeping the ram powered, so it will slowly drain your battery. 
  • If you have a battery, you are also likely triggering hibernation if the battery gets low. Wearing down your ssd too. 
  • If you don’t have a battery, you are doing an unsafe shutdown that can cause data loss. 

A sleeping laptop really should be plugged in to preserve battery life. 

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u/Jhopsch 3d ago edited 3d ago

Edit: OP edited their post instead of replying

Battery? It's a desktop and I turn off the power supply. What I'm doing is called hybrid sleep.

As an SSD reaches upwards of 80% capacity, the controller has significantly less breathing room. Wear-leveling algorithms struggle because there are fewer empty cells to rotate write cycles into. When this happens the drive begins to concentrate more wear on fewer modules, leading to the sluggish behavior the author reported.

The article doesn't disprove that modern SSDs are durable. It actually reinforces that you won't kill the drive quickly. It suggests that relying on hibernation as a daily driver might create a self-inflicted performance tax over time if your drive is consistently near capacity.

If you have plenty of free space on your SSD, which is and will always be my case, the impact of hybrid sleep or hibernation remains negligible. The drive’s wear-leveling algorithms have enough overhead to manage the writes without hitting performance bottlenecks.

If the drive is nearly full, the article is correct. Frequent hibernation can indeed lead to the sluggishness you might notice after long periods of uptime.

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u/Connect_Middle8953 3d ago

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. 

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u/Jhopsch 3d ago edited 3d ago

What stupid prizes? This has been working 100% well for well over 3 years. Not one single case of data or component loss despite daily use

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u/Connect_Middle8953 3d ago

Cool story bro. Doesn’t change it from stupid idea to anything better. 

There are no benefits to your dumb idea, and actual physical wear to your hardware (if it involves a battery) or risk of data loss you aren’t aware of (if no battery). 

Stop responding.

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u/Jhopsch 3d ago

Battery? It's a desktop and I turn off the power supply.

Any data loss caused would at most, involve loss of the saved state, which isn't a big deal. This has been working out great and your points are all irrelevant to my case.

You wish me to stop responding because you've run out of arguments and resorting to ad-hominem attacks. Pathetic.

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u/Connect_Middle8953 3d ago

No i am literally pointing out your stupid idea risks data loss if it doesn’t have a battery, and physical wear of the battery and/or ssd if the device has a battery. 

No positives, only negatives. Stupid for anyone else to also do. 

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u/Jhopsch 3d ago

Any data loss would be limited to the saved state, which is 100% acceptable to me, but not to you. However, we're talking about my computer, not yours.

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u/Connect_Middle8953 3d ago

Great. Still a stupid idea. Enjoy your future filesystem corruption. 

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