Technology

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.

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.

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.

Wait until he finds out what fast startup is

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.

That was a long article to essentially say there isn't a problem.

XDA dev articles are complete trash

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.

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

I dont believe this would have any impact, consumers just aren't ever getting near the level of r/w that would put the drive into failure.

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.

Thai is rather different from how Sleep works

No, that's (proofread anyone?) one of three modes: to disk, to RAM, hybrid.

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".

I wonder if sleep has much of an effect if any