Hibernating with 4GB RAM - impact on HDD life

Hello All:

I just bought a new laptop with 4GB RAM and Vista64. Should I be worried about the impact that hibernating will have on the life of the HDD? I'm asking because a complete on-hibernate-on cycle is a minimum of 8GB of read-write to the disk. Seems a lot to me.

More specifically, how much is an 8GB read-write activity in the normal day of a HDD used by a user with average computer usage habits? Is it the same as an entire day's usage? (In which case, I'm effectively halving my HDD life.) Or is it a minuscule (say, <5%) portion of it?

Thanks!
- Rajesh

 

Assuming it's not defective to begin with, your HDD will almost certainly outlive your laptop's useful lifespan.

I have many hard drives from the 1990's. All of them still work.

 

It may be a problem if you use a SSD.

 

Pretty much what the people above said.

In fact - I'm not even sure if read/write on na HDD isn't infinite.

You'd need to be more worried about any acceleration - i.e. bumping into things

 

Thanks for the replies, all...! It's amazing what misconceived notions one can carry ... for over 15 years for me in this case! All this while, every PC I'd get my hands on, I'd spend hours trying to do everything I could to reduce HDD access. After reading your replies, I spent last night trying to figure out where I'd gotten such a notion - it was from my first PC that I assembled in 1993. Its HDD crashed within a few months, and a friend convinced me its because I had installed Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (sigh...!), and not stuck with MS DOS 4.something like him...!

 

Stange notion indeed

SSDs have a limited "write life" but that's beyond what most users reach anyway.

HDDs will rather break from you bumping into something - especially when on.
Obviously you get the normal "electrial failure" where you electronics fail - but that can happen to any HDD or SSD for that matter.

 

And what's the maximum in your opinion?
And reading is and never was a problem, only writing is important.

However the maximum is the 4GB RAM, windows can't save more than your memory can hold. But most often only 2GB or less has to be saved, so nothing major.
And as the others already said, a HDD has no problems with this, a SSD, maybe.

The first part which fails on a HDD is the motor which is on all the time your PC is running. Other failing parts are broken circuit board or a stuck head. I think both things won't fail earlier because you write 2GB more to the HDD each day.

However, why don't you use sleep mode instead?

 

Isnt it better to turn the system off, to increase lifespan?

 

Depends for what.

Turning if off for 10 minutes no.
Turning off for a few hours potentially yes.

 

No!
Hibernating stores the RAM content on the HDD and shuts the whole system off. No CPU, no RAM, no HDD, nothing is on any longer.
If you turn it on again it loads the BIOS and then, instead of booting Windows it reads the stored RAM content from the HDD which allows you to continue your work where you left it.
So turning the system off once a month or so is good to let windows save changes and do other stuff at shutdown, else, it's not necessary.

Don't know how hibernating can harm a PC if he hibernates for a longer period.

 

I didn't comment on hibernating I was thinking in the way of shutdown.

But then again the most failure prone piece in a computer would be the HDDs motoranyway... so shutting down vs. hibernating vs. sleep are all equalygood/bad...

 

I do use sleep mode when I have to be off my laptop during the day (about 3-4 times a day). For overnight, I use hibernate. Also, I make sure I restart Windows at least once a week or when an update / install / uninstall demands it.

Since I run my laptop 95% of the time on mains power with the batteries removed, it would be preferable if I can hibernate the 3-4 times a day instead of sleep, since I can then turn off the mains supply (and that's some small risk less - due to voltage spikes, etc.).

It is the hibernate that is bothering me, because it takes a good 40-60 secs. of sustained HDD activity, that too twice per on-hibernate-on cycle. This is probably still better than an on-shutdown-on cycle in terms of HDD wearout, but I wanted to find out if the impact on HDD life is great enough that I should just forget it.

From the posts above, I gather that this impact is not much - the HDD usually outlives the useful life of a laptop.

Thanks, everyone.

 

Common knowledge would say so. But there is no conclusive study that shows otherwise.

And common knowledge says that frequent power cycles actually lowers the lifespan of your components.

Just goes to show how conclusive "common knowledge" is.

 

It's very rare these days for a HDD to fail since the technology had advanced since the old days. The platters and motor are more reliable. The MTF has increased also.

 

I am not using hibernate at all. If the break is less than an hour, I do "sleep" the laptop, otherwise I do "shut off".


--

 

I think what you mean is that it is rare for a HD to fail due to overwhelming writes and reads.

HD drives fail all the time due to age, but that has nothing to do with the number of writes and reads.

 

You might want to get some sort of defrag utility that can defrag the hibernate "file" on disk allowing for faster restarts and hibernates.

I like PerfectDisk ... there are others though ...

Obviously the more memory you have, the longer it will take to hibernate and wake up.

I hibernate all the time multiple times a day with a 2 year old laptop with its original 80GB hard drive ... system is still going strong ... love it!

 

Did I miss something ? If that was true I would think twice about buying SSD

 

Well, there is a limit as too how much you can write to a SSD.

However that limit is pretty high - if you check the spec sheets it will tell you how the lifespan is calculated.

Unless you hibernate a few times every day I don't think you'll get close to the limit anyway.

 

While there is a limit, it is debatable if it is significantly lower than a mechanical harddrive.

This "disadvantage" was a bigger considerations a few years ago when SSD drive controllers were still relatively immature.

 

Also, it was my understanding that SSD's had a "write algorithm" in them such that it would balance the writes to the cells to avoid one cell getting used much more than any other.

 

That is true also.

Definitely for Intel SSDs - no idea about other products, but I am pretty sure they would also use one

 

Pretty much all drive controllers theses days do that.

When Flash disks first hit the enterprise market, way way way before they showed up on the Consumer market, they use to constantly brick the drives because they were just scaled versions of the smaller controllers.

Another lesson in the Scalability fallacy