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Resolved Question

shutdown or sleep?

Sep 16, 2016 9:04AM PDT

I want to know that which one is better for my laptop's lifetime?

Discussion is locked

Hosein24 has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer

Best Answer

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Just shut it down
Sep 16, 2016 6:45PM PDT

As pointed out, sleep still uses some battery power.
As learned here on CNET, hibernate is not recommended if your computer has a SSD. If using a SSD, it will be ready to use just as quickly booting from shutdown as coming up from hiberation.
If your laptop uses a hard drive, then hibernation is OK, but the only advantage is quicker booting. We should all restart our computers regularly anyway, right?

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Pushing SSD to the limit for 2 years here.
Sep 17, 2016 6:35AM PDT

We have a test pig in the lab with Windowx XP and it's hibernating just fine after 2 years.

It's not one of the first gen SSDs so testing continues. Any rules we had when SSD was new may change.

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SSDs & hibernation
Sep 19, 2016 11:24AM PDT

You may have read this, from Aug. 4 - https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-ssds-solid-state-drives-work-increase-lifespan/
I realize it probably won't be an issue for the vast majority of users, but I take this info as true.
I assume the hibernation question infers hibernating on at least a daily basis. If your test XP machine has been hibernating for 2 years, that would be just one hibernation cycle, right?

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Actually it was a lot more than one a day.
Sep 19, 2016 11:59AM PDT

It was set to hibernate after 1 hour of non-use. So it could happen many times a day. Remember this is on some old rig and now we have moved it to W10 now that we have removed XP from our supported platform list.

The drive passed all tests and is moving on.

All this is your choice. My comment is that many of what folk were writing about were early gen SSDs which could wear out and die and did!

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Thanks
Sep 20, 2016 4:09AM PDT

I used to be confused on this as well, whether should I shut down or keep the laptop on sleep mode. But now I got it. Thank you.

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Answer
Depends
Sep 16, 2016 9:36AM PDT

If you use sleep the machine will be using a very small amount of power all the time your in sleep.
Might be a problem if your running off the battery.
You would have to watch the battery charge and see what the results are.

If you shutdown... every time you power up the machine you will have to reload the OS.
Which leads to a lot of work on your hdd if your doing that multiple times per day.

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Answer
Re: shutdown or sleep
Sep 16, 2016 10:56AM PDT

I prefer hibernate.

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Answer
I go with hibernate.
Sep 16, 2016 11:52AM PDT

It has nothing to do with lifespan. It's just my choice as I may want to unplug it and go somewhere. Sleep would be depending on the battery and why use that up?

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Answer
Sleep during the day, shutdown overnight
Sep 17, 2016 3:15AM PDT

During the day, if I'm coming back to the machine, I just shut the lid and let it sleep. If my Linux machine is sleeping and the battery gets critical, it wakes up and hibernates.

When I'm done for the day, I shutdown completely, nothing to do with lifespan, I like to get a clean start in the morning.

Hibernate on Windows has had its problems in restoring in the past but I've not seen them recently. I sometimes hibernate if I'm on my way out somewhere later in the day.

On an SSD hibernate is not good, you are using up your write cycles and an SSD boot is almost as fast as a resume.

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Answer
shut down
Sep 17, 2016 9:04AM PDT

I think you should shut it down