• Man discovers feature that has been around since Windows Vista, and decides to write a ragebait article about 20 year old technology.

    • 8 hours

      To be fair, windows hibernates a lot without telling the user (hibernates when shutting down, hibernates after sleeping too long). Hibernating when shutting down was largely meant to help with slow boot times on HDDs, and it maybe shouldn’t be default now that everyone is on SSDs that both boot faster and receive more wear from hibernating.

      • Hibernation on laptops helps preserve standby battery life, and I personally appreciate it as I may close my laptop lid and forget about it for a week.

        • 1 hour

          Yeah well “Shut Down” doesn’t need to be an alias to Hibernate, which it has been since vista

  • 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.

    • 6 hours

      12 years is beyond the lifetime of a computer?

      looks at my 13-year-old PC w/ original hard drive still going strong

      • 6 hours

        My oldest SDD is still at like 85% health and it’s almost 15 years old O:

        Shoot, my VR machine is about 13 years old with original CPU, RAM, and HDD! It has my old SSD now and a newer video card (2070) so it can play rhythm games at 90-120FPS.

        My oldest working (working for tasks I’d actually use a computer for, not retro fun) computer is 15 years old! MacBook Pro. I need to get Linux installed on it. That’s a project for… eventually.

      • Mine is 17 years old and is still over-specced because I use Linux and bought it with 16GB RAM then. And it is the second PC I ever bought, my first one was an Pentium-class PC (actually AMD K6@300MHz) that I bought in 1998.

      • 6 hours

        it usually depends on context of how the computer is being used, but usually speaking, the major OS companies invalidate older hardware.

        intels 7700k(2017) and older are invalidated for W11 usage and W10 is on life support now for security. Apple is approaching the time period where its about to sunset intel based macbook/mac mini/imac/mac pro support.

        in the context of mainstream general computers, 12 years is a LONG time. its also around the cutoff for whats worth selling vs whats worth recycling at my workplace.

      • I have a pile of spinning disks that were online for less than ten years under low usage load that failed. I have bins and bins full of them at work with enterprise drives too.

        I have personally had a single ssd fail in 15 years, it was an SX6000 that died from controller issues. My first ones were 64GB ones back in the infancy of SSDs. The controllers have come a long way and speeds are now 10-100x faster and much more reliable. Never, ever had one go bad from TBW personally or professionally. I’ve never even met someone who has gotten that to happen, the controllers usually go long before the NAND.

        12 years is still beyond the lifetime of a typical computer. Even if you do not have component failures you start spending more money on power to run these things than it would cost to replace them with faster, larger capacity newer systems that use less energy for more oompf. Only people with free or nearly free power are immune to this which is not common.

        I’m not saying just throw out all the old systems though, but most people aren’t gonna limp along on a 12 year old system as their daily driver. It might be ok for basic web browsing, word processing and email… but not much more than that. If it’s a laptop it’s gonna be dog slow.

  • 9 hours

    It just seems someone doesn’t know the difference between hibernate and suspend and is finding out that one writes to the disk.

    • 3 hours

      That’s what this article was about actually. Explaining hibernate, the consequences, giving a realistic impact of using it, explaining sleep and the benefits.

  • 9 hours

    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.

    • 2 hours

      Windows could be considered uniquely responsible here since on a desktop you might think you’re safe from this if you always shut it down properly after use. Yet “fast startup” is a thing. It’s a questionable default that should be revisited.

  • 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.

    • 6 hours

      Lid closed sensor thought the laptop was open for One (1) millisecond.

  • 8 hours

    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.

  • Thai is rather different from how Sleep works

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

  • 8 hours

    I wonder if sleep has much of an effect if any

    • 8 hours

      Normally sleep wouldn’t affect it, because it just keeps the ram powered and doesn’t write to the SSD.

      However I think windows will quietly hibernate if the computer has been asleep too long. At least on laptops it will automatically hibernate after a few hours of sleep, or after a % of battery is used.

      • 7 hours

        ‘hybrid sleep’ does write the hibernate file before going into ‘sleep mode’. if you have an older system or one that doesn’t use ‘modern standby’ and you have an ssd, you might want to double-check that setting in your power scheme advanced settings.