I know some people disable fast boot/hybrid shutdown but I tend to leave as much of Windows at default as possible (apart from system restore - why does MS disable that by default?!!!)
anyway, I wonder if the hiberfil.sys file on shutdown gets rewritten from scratch on every shutdown or does Windows just update/change it where required? It does seem a waste of write cycles if it recreates the whole file each time.
thanks, Wayne
Out of practical necessity the hyberfil.sys file would be completely rewritten. When used with hybrid shutdown the file would contain a copy of a portion of RAM. Updating a file makes sense when the changes are minor but due to the way RAM is used in a modern OS the changes from one shutdown to the next are likely to be massive. Understand that neither the file system nor hardware allows individual bytes to be written to a drive. If even one bit in a block is changed the entire block must be written. And updates require that an initial read be done to see what changes are needed.
Thank you. That's disappointing to hear since that sounds like it will be causing excessive SSD writes and significantly contributing to wear. I use the function of Fast Start/Hybrid Shutdown but sometimes find I am turning the PC two to three times a day for varying reasons/requirements. That's a significant amount of activity for the SSD to cope with. My 500 GB SSD is only half full (even after a year of owning the PC) so maybe that helps alleviate the strain on the SSD but of that I don't know. I've tried to read up on SSD longevity but sometimes the technical aspects of what I read go over my head. Unfortunately they don't seem to last long enough. I know I could switch the feature off to alleviate some of the concern but I do like the speed gain on boot even if it isn't a huge increase. It's a tough balancing act to consider I guess.
The reason I thought it might just be updating changes is purely because on shutdown it is taking a few seconds (if that) and I am surprised it is so quick to do so. I don't know how big the hiberfil.sys file would be by default on my machine with 16GB ram but if it's approx. 16GB in size it seems to be able to write it to the SSD extremely fast on shutdown.
When used for hibernation all of memory would be written to the hiberfil.sys file but for hybrid shutdown it would be much less.
SSDs do have limited writes but that value is so high that it doesn't become a factor during real world usage. These drives usually fail for other reasons long before limited writes become a factor.
i turn off this feature bcus my HDD is cheap and not 7200rpm
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