[SOLVED] Is it OK to hibernate your PC every single time?

[Sagar_20]

Can it possibly have a bad impact on the storage drive?

 

[SkyNetRising]

Hibernation writes all contents of ram to storage device.
For SSD this can result in significant number of used write cycles and reduced lifespan.
For HDD that probably wouldn't matter much.

 

[Solandri]

Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft changed the Shutdown command into a pseudo-hibernate. Rather than actually shutting down the computer, it unloads all active programs from memory, then writes the contents of RAM (basically just Windows) to your drive. When you turn on the computer, instead of booting completely from scratch, it just reloads that memory image back into RAM.

So with Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, even if you shut down the computer, it's still hibernating in a way. To do a real shutdown, you counter-intuitively have to select Restart from the power menu, not Shutdown. This can bite you when an update says it's waiting for a restart before it installs. A shutdown followed by a power on will not install the update. You have to restart before it installs.

This pseudo-hibernate makes sense if Windows is installed on a HDD (reading a big memory image is a lot faster than reading a bunch of small boot files). But a SSD will boot nearly as quickly or faster from scratch (and does a true shutdown much more quickly). So if you're booting off a SSD, I'd recommend disabling this "feature".

https://lifehacker.com/shutting-down-windows-10-doesnt-actually-shut-down-wind-1825532376

Unless you've got a small SSD (like 120 GB) and 16+ GB of RAM, or do a lot of hibernates every day, I wouldn't worry about the impact on the SSD's write endurance. Modern large-capacity SSDs can withstand 100+ GB of writes every day and still last a decade or more. And occasionally, being able to hibernate is useful (e.g. you have a bunch of programs and a dozen browser tabs open and arranged exactly the way you want, but you need to turn off the computer for a few hours and would like to do so without losing that arrangement). So I usually don't disable hibernate. But I do disable fast boot.

 

[Sagar_20]

Unless you've got a small SSD (like 120 GB) and 16+ GB of RAM, or do a lot of hibernates every day, I wouldn't worry about the impact on the SSD's write endurance. Modern large-capacity SSDs can withstand 100+ GB of writes every day and still last a decade or more. And occasionally, being able to hibernate is useful (e.g. you have a bunch of programs and a dozen browser tabs open and arranged exactly the way you want, but you need to turn off the computer for a few hours and would like to do so without losing that arrangement). So I usually don't disable hibernate. But I do disable fast boot.

I am glad i have Win 7 HP

Since fast boot affects the write cycles, it shouldn't have been auto-enabled but win 10 was probably released much before SSD's got common, so no issue there.

Btw, in Win 7, power options, there's an option called hybrid sleep which i keep turned off, because otherwise, hibernate option goes way.
I hope, there will be no problem if i enable it anyway.

 

[King_V]

Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft changed the Shutdown command into a pseudo-hibernate. Rather than actually shutting down the computer, it unloads all active programs from memory, then writes the contents of RAM (basically just Windows) to your drive. When you turn on the computer, instead of booting completely from scratch, it just reloads that memory image back into RAM.

So with Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, even if you shut down the computer, it's still hibernating in a way. To do a real shutdown, you counter-intuitively have to select Restart from the power menu, not Shutdown. This can bite you when an update says it's waiting for a restart before it installs. A shutdown followed by a power on will not install the update. You have to restart before it installs.

This pseudo-hibernate makes sense if Windows is installed on a HDD (reading a big memory image is a lot faster than reading a bunch of small boot files). But a SSD will boot nearly as quickly or faster from scratch (and does a true shutdown much more quickly). So if you're booting off a SSD, I'd recommend disabling this "feature".

https://lifehacker.com/shutting-down-windows-10-doesnt-actually-shut-down-wind-1825532376

Unless you've got a small SSD (like 120 GB) and 16+ GB of RAM, or do a lot of hibernates every day, I wouldn't worry about the impact on the SSD's write endurance. Modern large-capacity SSDs can withstand 100+ GB of writes every day and still last a decade or more. And occasionally, being able to hibernate is useful (e.g. you have a bunch of programs and a dozen browser tabs open and arranged exactly the way you want, but you need to turn off the computer for a few hours and would like to do so without losing that arrangement). So I usually don't disable hibernate. But I do disable fast boot.

So that I wouldn't ever have a hiberfil.sys, when I did a clean install of my OS onto my SSD, I went in and ran a command that disables hibernate mode.

Does the shutdown still use a pseudo-hibernate state when hibernate mode is disabled?

 

[Solandri]

Hibernate needs to be enabled for fast-boot to work. It dumps the reduced OS image in RAM into hiberfil.sys, and disabling hibernate deletes hiberfil.sys.

 

[King_V]

Thanks, that's good to know - I disabled hibernate mode specifically because I didn't want the extra writes to the SSD. So, I've got a proper, full shutdown, then.

After all, with SSDs, things boot pretty darn fast.