The idea that hibernation is going to cause substantial SSD wear is ludicrous on all but the smallest SSDs in systems with large amounts of RAM.
Hibernation is only going to be saving ram in memory, so for most consumer systems 8, 16 or 32GB. Most SSDs nowadays are rated for hundreds to thousands of terabytes written as an effective life so you would need to hibernate hundreds of thousands of times. Even an aggressively low lifespan drive like a 256GB with ~500TBW would last over 18,000 full 32GB writes. Let’s pretend you hibernate four times a day every day, every year. 365*4 = 1460 hibernations per year. 18,000/1460 = 12.32 years. Long past the lifespan of a computer. No spinning disk is likely to survive this long either.
They even call it out in their article with their own math of twice a year and come up with 25 years of life. Just not something to worry about, at all, for almost any practical use case.
Man discovers feature that has been around since Windows Vista, and decides to write a ragebait article about 20 year old technology.
It just seems someone doesn’t know the difference between hibernate and suspend and is finding out that one writes to the disk.
That’s what this article was about actually. Explaining hibernate, the consequences, giving a realistic impact of using it, explaining sleep and the benefits.
Always give your computer 8 hours sleep per night to keep it healthy
Sleep works great until you are the unfortunate winner of the computer randomly deciding to wake up and your GPU power cable deciding 4am is the best time to shit itself.
Also fun boring dystopia problem, my “smart” TV for some reason kept triggering one of my workstations to come back online through wake on LAN. Moved the TV over to its own vlan and of course that problem is partially solved.
Yeah I had the problem of my mouse randomly registering 0.1mm of movement from a dust particles moving and turning the PC on randomly. I just use shut down, everything else is too annoying.
This is clickbait. Having hibernation and writing 32GB of RAM to the SSD are not “Windows 11”, but standard behavior on any OS with hibernation.
In my experience, the fragility and unreliably of M.2 and SSD has been greatly overstated.
Wait until he finds out what fast startup is
Hibernation technically does this to any SSD. It’s not just Windows 11.
Writing the entire contents of RAM to disk increases the wear on the SSD. The risk goes up if your SSD is nearly full and wear-levelling has to move more data around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification#Wear_leveling
Yeah especially if you have a titchy laptop with 256GB SSD and 32GB RAM… that’s a huge relative percentage of storage wasted on a hiberfil.
I use Linux now, but when I did use Windows, I always turned off hibernate. It had it’s time in WinXP or 95 era, when hard drives took so long to spin up that you could leave and make a whole coffee and it would almost be done by the time you get back. We don’t need it anymore!
the culprit is actually probably “fast startup” which writes a hibernate file every shutdown. every “normal” ‘shutdown’… close programs, logoff, hibernate, power off. this feature is unnecessary on systems with ssd but it continues to be enabled by default. it was created in the days of old to make hdd systems appear to boot up faster by not actually starting up windows on every power on.
hibernate isn’t enabled by default.
the other writer of hibernate data, hybrid sleep, doesn’t even exist on a newer system that uses ‘modern standby’… but is enabled by default on desktops that do not.
That was a long article to essentially say there isn’t a problem.
Thai is rather different from how Sleep works
No, that’s (proofread anyone?) one of three modes: to disk, to RAM, hybrid.
XDA dev articles are complete trash
Windows 11 sleep/hibernate is garbage. I will regularly pull out a hot laptop from my backpack with a nearly dead battery. This used to be my problem with Ubuntu and now Ubuntu handles it just fine.
Might explain why, for like a decade now, my computer will never stay asleep or in hibernation or whatever the hell. Always just wakes up by itself. Luckily SSDs are so fast that I just turn the thing off when I’m not using it now, but it’s still annoying.
I read tech article the other day where the engineer had made several LLM calls and over engineered controlling a smart home light. Then wrote a massive corporate ridden psychoses article about it like he was delivering the word of God.
I can’t remember what company had posted it. One of the search vendors I think but it was not cool. It’s like everyone got laid off and the only people left is some execs nephew that’s “good at computers”.






