Question sleep vs hibernate on Windows 11, plus advanced power settings "turn off hard disk after X minutes..."

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

Back in April, I replaced an ~9 year old Intel based desktop PC, using an old tower case, an AMD 5600G and an MSI B450m Pro VDH Max motherboard. I popped in 32GB of RAM, and set a 1TB Silicon Power m.2 SSD (800 Terabytes written)
as the boot drive. I also added a 5400 RPM 4TB Western Digital HDD for storage. (left a little space unpartitioned in case I decide to install Linux Mint as well later) I figured I would put Windows and a few other small regularly used things on the SSD, and use the HDD for our family photo backups and Steam games.

It has been quite solid since the initial setup, with only a couple of things that have annoyed me:

A) Often, when I went to launch a browser, (didn't matter whether it was Firefox, Edge or Chrome), there would be quite a delay before it would launch, and I would have to double click 3 or 4 times. Not sure what was going on. I verified that the browsers were installed to the SSD, not the HDD, so I'm not sure why this behavior would occur. I did eventually go in to advanced power settings. I thought I had everything set to stay on, but in there I noticed that it was set to have the Hard Disk power down after 20 minutes. Would this affect the SSD as well as the HDD? I did notice that I was fairly often hearing a sound like a hard drive spinning up or down, so I'm hoping that making this change will change that behavior. I'm thinking that having it spin down after 20 minutes all of the time probably wasn't that good for it.

Of course, once I was in there, I found myself thinking about sleep vs hibernate for Windows 11. I remember having my old system set to hibernate after 3 or 4 hours. I would manually put it to sleep if I knew I was going to work, but that someone else might need to use it. I'm not sure whether I should set the desktop to be always on, sleep or hibernate after several hours.

Which would be best for the HDD longevity? (drive specs from speccy)

 

[mikeymikec]

Unless you have all your browsers say set to save downloads to the HDD, I doubt the HDD has any relevance for the performance issue. Your idea of disabling HDD spin-down can further prove that point. I personally haven't encountered anything that suggests that Windows powers down SSDs with this setting.

I've been running with a boot SSD + HDD for data setup for nearly ten years and my experience is that Windows loves to randomly fire up the HDD from power-saving mode, but I've never experienced anything like what you're describing (despite one of my browsers being set to save downloads to HDD by default).

I'd start by looking in the Windows event viewer > custom views > administrative events, around the times you've experienced these weird performance drop-outs. Personally my money is on your SSD with 800TB written. It wouldn't surprise me if it's on the cusp of being ineligible for warranty based on the TBW figures listed here:

https://www.silicon-power.com/support/lang/big5/TBW.pdf

PS: I'm not saying that just because you might be near TBW then that'll be the reason for it acting up, just that your drive has evidently seen a fair bit of action and they guarantee their kit up to a certain point for a reason.

Are you seeing any stability issues? You could run Nirsoft's BlueScreenView for a list of Windows crashes, and Control Panel > Security and Reliability > Maintenance > View Reliability History to get a good view of this.

Sleep / hibernate: In Linux I use my HDD's APM function to shut the drive down independently from sleep mode. I think I get about 10-15 minutes idle time it before it powers down. My HDD usage is a case of periods of non-stop usage or periods of complete non-use. My essential day-to-day stuff is all on SSD. Stuff like install files, music, video and photos are on the HDD.

IMO there shouldn't be much difference between hibernating vs shutting down with a reasonably decent SSD, so I'd forget about hibernate. Sleep mode in Windows (better referred to as hybrid sleep as it's S3 sleep mode combined with hibernation as a backup option) gives you the power saving advantage of sleep mode combined with a resume within say 10 seconds. I have Linux set to sleep within 15 minutes idle time to ensure that if I walk away from my computer for longer than expected then I'm not wasting electricity. In terms of power usage there's next to no difference on a desktop between sleep and hibernate; a desktop will draw less than 5W in either case. I'm not sure what precisely your question is but I hope I've answered it.

PPS: I do hope you're not planning on complaining about worse performance in Linux after you've installed it on a slow-as-hell 5400RPM HDD Why not really put the boot in and use an SMR drive...

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

The SSD is a Silicon Power XD80, with 800 Terabytes Written wear rating, and/or 5 years, whichever comes first. According to Silicon Power's Toolbox utility, after 2.5 months from when I built the PC, the has just under half a Terabyte Written, out of 800 for the warranty. At that rate, it would seem to average less than 4TB written per year, so I think it should last quite a while - I'm guessing the 5 years probably comes first. It says estimated life remaining is over 99%...

Oh, and I haven't heard the HDD spin up or down since changing the 20 minutes to 0 to turn that off. I haven't yet experienced the previous delay when trying to launch any of the browsers - I'll have to keep an eye on that for a few days to see if it is resolved, too.