SSD, hibernation and wear... Needing advice!

Julio Cortez

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Hi everyone :)

I got my copy of Windows 8 off Dreamspark several days ago and I decided to try it on my notebook. Well, first of all I must say that I really like the way it's quicker and neater than Seven.

but considering that quite everything I use is desktop-based, I tried different ways to bypass the Modern UI Start screen and stay on the desktop as much as possible (at least for now).

Eventually I decided to create a shortcut to "shutdown /h" and pin it to the taskbar where Seven formerly had the orb (so I could just hibernate the system by clicking once on it).

Now, this is the question: seeing that I use hibernation 3/4 times per day, and that Windows 8 is installed onto a Samsung 470 SSD...
Does the lifespan of the disk get significantly shorter (because of the limited rewrite cycles supported by the SSD drives) if I use hibernation instead of the normal shutdown?

I believe not, but any advice/suggestion would be very appreciated! :)

Tnank you in advance!
 

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You don't need to worry about hibernation, I use the "OS optimisation" in Samsung Magician, it tunes my ssd.
 

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I know this is off topic, but instead of creating a shortcut to pin on the task bar, why didn't you just set your laptop's power button to hibernate?
 

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    500GB Samsung Momentus
Well, it might be a good idea of which I didn't think before. I'll do it immediately! ;)
You know, being used to a desktop PC (on which there's still Windows 7) I feel more comfortable using the Start orb to hibernate instead of pressing the power button...

Thanks for the suggestion :)
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 10 1703
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    I've made it myself :)
    CPU
    intel Core i7 920
    Motherboard
    ASUS P6T
    Memory
    12GB DDR3 Corsair XMS3
    Graphics Card(s)
    Sapphire AMD R9 270X
    Sound Card
    onboard
    Monitor(s) Displays
    My living room TV
    Screen Resolution
    Too high for that card
    Hard Drives
    If they're that hard, why do they break so often?
    PSU
    LC Power GP3 650W
    Case
    CoolerMaster Centurion
    Cooling
    Still lots of fans :(
    Keyboard
    Logitech K400r
    Mouse
    Mice are overrated
    Internet Speed
    I'd rather use travelling pigeons
I think that MS is subtly trying to get users comfortable with hardware buttons and hot keys. Once you learn those, Windows 8 becomes much more usable.
 

My Computer

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    Windows Server 2012 Standard w/Hyper-V
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    HP ProBook 4430s
    CPU
    Intel Core i3-2310M
    Memory
    16GB DDR3
    Hard Drives
    80GB Intel 320 SSD
    500GB Samsung Momentus
If you're using an SSD drive, then you shouldn't need hibernation. The whole idea behind hibernation, is to boot up quickly. An SSD drive also allows you to boot up quickly. My one device with an SSD drive is my Samsung series 7 slate. It certainly does not need hibernation. If you need to keep the machine at a certain state with certain programs loaded, sleep may work just as well. On my Slate, sleep does seem to power the device down. YMMV...

Back when Windows 7 first came out, I read where hibernation can corrupt the OS. I don't know how true that statement is, but I've always kept in mind.

However, I don't have an answer about the life span of the SSD drive...
 

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If you're using an SSD drive, then you shouldn't need hibernation. The whole idea behind hibernation, is to boot up quickly.

This is 100% false. Hibernation was not invented for quick booting of hardware. The point of hibernate is to allow one to completely power down the computer while saving the current working state. It's essentially an evolution of sleep. Only in Windows 8 has hiberfile.sys been used for fast startup, by allowing the system to copy the kernel to the file. However, unlike actual hibernation, fast startup does not copy the contents of RAM (i.e. the working state) to hiberfile.sys

If you need to keep the machine at a certain state with certain programs loaded, sleep may work just as well. On my Slate, sleep does seem to power the device down.

Your Slate is not completely powering down if it is in sleep. There is still some power draw. On a tablet, this is going to be quite a bit less than on a laptop, but it's still there. Sleep does work well if you aren't going to leave it for a while, but if you are going to be away from a power source for a long period of time, you may wish to hibernate instead.

Back when Windows 7 first came out, I read where hibernation can corrupt the OS. I don't know how true that statement is, but I've always kept in mind

I have never seen this, nor have I ever heard a report of this happening.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows Server 2012 Standard w/Hyper-V
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    HP ProBook 4430s
    CPU
    Intel Core i3-2310M
    Memory
    16GB DDR3
    Hard Drives
    80GB Intel 320 SSD
    500GB Samsung Momentus
Sleep does work well if you aren't going to leave it for a while, but if you are going to be away from a power source for a long period of time, you may wish to hibernate instead.

A decent UPS such as my APC XS1500 coupled with APC's Powerchute Personal wakes my PC from sleep to hibernate it in the event of a prolonged outage. This means I can turn off hybrid sleep on my desktop and avoid the excessive pointless writes that could add up to 40 GB/day or more for me, far exceeding the specs Intel has published for their X25-M series SSD, which is 10 GB/day for 5 year warranty IIRC. Some people say this is overly conservative, even for the newer drives, which IIRC are rated for something like 40% fewer write cycles, mitigated to some extent by controllers that use data compression, which would be 0% mitigation for me as I use Truecrypt, which makes all my data incompressible. However, if you believe Intel, you can mitigate this by overprovisioning the drive, and Intel has papers on that, too. I don't ever shut my computer down anymore and only rarely hibernate; I've been sleeping it several times a day for a couple of years now, and it's been just great. Completely reliable.

It should also be reasonably safe to turn off hybrid sleep on a laptop and just use regular sleep, and that's because the laptop has an internal battery. In general, you should hibernate only when you want to save the state when you shut down the computer or expect to run out of battery power. I don't know if laptops will wake to hibernate when the battery is running down.

There is another reason to hibernate. If you use Truecrypt, hibernating ensures the next time the computer is powered on, the person using it will have to re-enter the Truecrypt password, which is important if you ever leave your computer unattended. For the desktop in my home, I assume a thief would just steal it as quickly as possible, so I don't ordinarily worry about leaving it in sleep mode, because if he rips the cord out of the wall, he'll have to reboot from scratch and go through Truecrypt. I do use a strong Windows password, so if he found my PC in sleep mode, he'd have to break that to get my data before unplugging it, and I really doubt some crackhead is going to try that much less succeed at it. (NB: None of this protects against evil maid attacks, but it does help protect against simple theft.)
 

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Have a look at the Samsung 830 256GB, in this SSD endurance testing thread.
SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

These numbers are from a couple weeks ago.
(PiB) 4.48 = 5.04 PB (Petabyte) = 5,040 TB = 5,040,000 GB
It's showing signs of wear but, still going.

The average desktop user writes between 7-10 GB worth of information per day.
You can figure out your average writes and do your own calculations.
The easy one, let's use 20GB per day of writes:
7.3 TB per year
5040TB/7.3 = 690 years

Even 100 GB per day still gives you 138 years, not bad.

Even if you get half the SSD life Christopher did your still looking at a lot of writes and a lot of years.
This would mean the 128GB model (quick extrapolation) might get 345years at 20GB/day and 69 years at 100GB/day.
A fifth of that is acceptable.

Not saying reducing writes on SSDs is bad.
I don't worry about writes to SSDs anymore.
The rumors about SSDs being fragile are grossly exaggerated.
 

My Computer

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    Windows 8.1 Pro x64/ Windows 7 Ult x64
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    Intel Core i5-3570K 4.6GHz
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    Dell Venue 8Pro: Baytrail Z3740D, 2GB Ram, 64GB HDD, 8" IPS Display 1280 x 800, Active Stylus.
    Haswell laptop: HP Envy 17t-j, i7-4700MQ, GeForce 740M 2GB DDR3, 17.3" Full HD 1920x1080, 16GB RAM, Samsung 840 Pro 128GB, 1TB Hitachi 7200 HDD,
    Desktop: eSATA ports,
    External eSATA Seagate 500GB SATA2 7200rpm,
Have a look at the Samsung 830 256GB, in this SSD endurance testing thread.
SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

These numbers are from a couple weeks ago.
(PiB) 4.48 = 5.04 PB (Petabyte) = 5,040 TB = 5,040,000 GB
It's showing signs of wear but, still going.

The average desktop user writes between 7-10 GB worth of information per day.
You can figure out your average writes and do your own calculations.
The easy one, let's use 20GB per day of writes:
7.3 TB per year
5040TB/7.3 = 690 years

Even 100 GB per day still gives you 138 years, not bad.

Even if you get half the SSD life Christopher did your still looking at a lot of writes and a lot of years.
This would mean the 128GB model (quick extrapolation) might get 345years at 20GB/day and 69 years at 100GB/day.
A fifth of that is acceptable.

Not saying reducing writes on SSDs is bad.
I don't worry about writes to SSDs anymore.
The rumors about SSDs being fragile are grossly exaggerated.

I hope that's right. It doesn't change the fact that Intel rates their 520 series for "a minimum of five years of useful life under typical client workloads with up to 20 GB of host writes per day." It may be Intel deliberately set the bar low by a factor of almost 140 (their 5 years vs your 690) to limit their warranty exposure, but then they also went to the trouble of writing whitepapers on overprovisioning that reflect their published specs, which would make for a pretty elaborate fraud. Do other manufacturers specify consumer-level drives any higher?
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center
If you're using an SSD drive, then you shouldn't need hibernation.
Given the default shutdown or restart states are not actually shutting down the kernel (it's hibernating), using Windows 8 actually DOES need hibernation. Given this makes the Windows 8 (re)boot process much faster, it's something I would never recommend changing either - SSD + Windows 8 is a fast boot, and if you can do it on UEFI class 3 hardware, it should be almost instantaneous.

As to wear on the disk, it would depend on the drive and how it's otherwise used. Most gen-2 and 3 drives, under what would be considered normal wear and tear usage, should last for many years (I've seen estimates of close to 20 years, but I'd suspect it's likely to be more like 7-10 years. I have nothing to back this up, just skepticism...) - perhaps longer than mechanical disks would be expected to live.

It's a good question to ask, of course, but the answer really is "it depends". If the SSD hardware lasts even half as long as the manufacturers project under normal usage, it should end up being about the same, or slightly longer than, a mechanical drive would.
 

My Computer

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  • OS
    Windows 8.1 x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Custom
    CPU
    Intel Core i7 4790K @ 4.5GHz
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    Asus Maximus Hero VII
    Memory
    32GB DDR3
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    4x WD RE 2TB (RAIDZ)
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    Corsair AX760i
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    Fractal Design Define R4
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    Noctua NH-D15
Have a look at the Samsung 830 256GB, in this SSD endurance testing thread.
SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

These numbers are from a couple weeks ago.
(PiB) 4.48 = 5.04 PB (Petabyte) = 5,040 TB = 5,040,000 GB
It's showing signs of wear but, still going.

The average desktop user writes between 7-10 GB worth of information per day.
You can figure out your average writes and do your own calculations.
The easy one, let's use 20GB per day of writes:
7.3 TB per year
5040TB/7.3 = 690 years

Even 100 GB per day still gives you 138 years, not bad.

Even if you get half the SSD life Christopher did your still looking at a lot of writes and a lot of years.
This would mean the 128GB model (quick extrapolation) might get 345years at 20GB/day and 69 years at 100GB/day.
A fifth of that is acceptable.

Not saying reducing writes on SSDs is bad.
I don't worry about writes to SSDs anymore.
The rumors about SSDs being fragile are grossly exaggerated.

I hope that's right. It doesn't change the fact that Intel rates their 520 series for "a minimum of five years of useful life under typical client workloads with up to 20 GB of host writes per day." It may be Intel deliberately set the bar low by a factor of almost 140 (their 5 years vs your 690) to limit their warranty exposure, but then they also went to the trouble of writing whitepapers on overprovisioning that reflect their published specs, which would make for a pretty elaborate fraud. Do other manufacturers specify consumer-level drives any higher?

If you check the link to the endurance test there are Intel SSDs in the test and they performed writes much longer than the Intel estimates.
As we know, each drive may be different for several reasons, the testing on that site just shows that SSDs are lasting much longer than the manufacturers have rated them for.
They are being conservative, can't imagine any of them giving a rating for much more than 5 years even if they know better.

The Samsung SSDs seem to be writing more than other drives.
If you calculate your usage and the number of writes on a particular drive, you can get a ballpark figure.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 Pro x64/ Windows 7 Ult x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    76~2.0
    CPU
    Intel Core i5-3570K 4.6GHz
    Motherboard
    GIGABYTE GA-Z77X UD3H f18
    Memory
    8GB (2X4GB) DDR3 1600 CORSAIR Vengeance CL8 1.5v
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    Sound Card
    Onboard VIA VT2021
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    22" LCD Dell SP2208WFP
    Screen Resolution
    1680x1050
    Hard Drives
    Samaung 840Pro 128GB, Seagate 500GB SATA2 7200rpm 32mb, Seagate 1TB SATA2 7200rpm 32mb,
    PSU
    Corsair HX650W
    Case
    Cooler Master Storm Scout
    Cooling
    Corsair H80 w/Noctua NF P12 12cm fan, case fans 2X14cm
    Keyboard
    Logitech Wave
    Mouse
    CM Sentinel
    Internet Speed
    Abysmal
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    Opera Next
    Other Info
    Dell Venue 8Pro: Baytrail Z3740D, 2GB Ram, 64GB HDD, 8" IPS Display 1280 x 800, Active Stylus.
    Haswell laptop: HP Envy 17t-j, i7-4700MQ, GeForce 740M 2GB DDR3, 17.3" Full HD 1920x1080, 16GB RAM, Samsung 840 Pro 128GB, 1TB Hitachi 7200 HDD,
    Desktop: eSATA ports,
    External eSATA Seagate 500GB SATA2 7200rpm,
Whatever the truth about SSD longevity is, everything I said about disabling hybrid sleep and using regular sleep still makes sense in the situations I described. Eliminating possibly 10's of gigabytes of unnecessary writes per day can't be a bad thing.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center
Hybrid sleep is something else. It's good for desktops where someone may not have a battery backup and could use the added benefit of having the PC write to the hibernate file before sleeping in case it loses power. I believe it's usually disabled by default on a laptop.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows Server 2012 Standard w/Hyper-V
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    HP ProBook 4430s
    CPU
    Intel Core i3-2310M
    Memory
    16GB DDR3
    Hard Drives
    80GB Intel 320 SSD
    500GB Samsung Momentus
Hybrid sleep is something else. It's good for desktops where someone may not have a battery backup and could use the added benefit of having the PC write to the hibernate file before sleeping in case it loses power. I believe it's usually disabled by default on a laptop.

I understand what hybrid sleep is. I referred to an earlier message in this thread where I described the conditions under which it can be safely disabled and regular sleep used (along with some obscure potential security considerations). It may not be apparent to most that a UPS and its associated software may be able to wake a PC from sleep to hibernate it in the event of a prolonged outage, which is the main thing I talked about. I don't remember what the default is on a laptop, but the same sort of consideration applies if you have a working battery. (I don't, so ironically, I made sure hybrid sleep is enabled on my laptop, which I don't use enough to care about buying a new one.)
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center
I use Hybrid Sleep on my desktop and laptop. IMHO, Hybrid Sleep serves better purpose on laptops.

Situations Hybrid Sleep works well with (desktop/laptop in sleep mode):

Laptop plugged in with no battery in sleep mode then someone accidental trips on the power cord or the laptop gets moved and the power plug comes off.

Laptop running extremely low on battery and you set to sleep and forgot about it.

Laptop in sleep mode and then some jerk/kids/friends prank decides to remove the battery.

Desktop or laptop plugged in with no battery in sleep mode then the power goes out.

:p
 

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    Intel Core i7-2670QM
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    Intel 525 120GB | HGST Travelstar 1TB
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    CM Storm Xornet | Microsoft Sculpt Comfort
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    25 Mbps | 600 Kbps
    Other Info
    Seagate Backup Plus 1TB

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Win 10 Pro 64bit
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Home built Intel i7-3770k-based system
    CPU
    Intel i7-3770k, Overclocked to 4.6GHz (46x100) with Corsair H110i GT cooler
    Motherboard
    ASRock Z77 OC Formula 2.30 BIOS
    Memory
    32GB DDR3 2133 Corsair Vengeance Pro
    Graphics Card(s)
    GeForce GTX 980ti SC ACS 6GB DDR5 by EVGA
    Sound Card
    Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD, Corsair SP2500 speakers and subwoofer
    Monitor(s) Displays
    LG 27EA33 [Monitor] (27.2"vis) HDMI
    Screen Resolution
    1920x1080
    Hard Drives
    Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB (system drive)
    WD 6TB Red NAS hard drives x 2 in Storage Spaces (redundancy)
    PSU
    Corsair 750ax fully modular power supply with sleeved cables
    Case
    Corsair Air 540 with 7 x 140mm fans on front, rear and top panels
    Cooling
    Corsair H110i GT liquid cooled CPU with 4 x 140" Corsair SP "push-pull" and 3 x 140mm fans
    Keyboard
    Thermaltake Poseidon Z illuminated keyboard
    Mouse
    Corsair M65 wired
    Internet Speed
    85MBps DSL
    Browser
    Chrome and Edge
    Antivirus
    Windows Defender, MalwareBytes Pro and CCleaner Pro
    Other Info
    Client of Windows Server 2012 R2 10 PC's, laptops and smartphones on the WLAN.

    1GBps Ethernet ports
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