In the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification, hibernation is called suspend-to-disk and is the S4 power state in the standard. It hence takes less time to write to disk and resume. Hybrid Boot mode where the user is logged out before hibernating, thereby drastically reducing the size of the hibernation. During a complete power loss (power outage scenario), when RAM is offline, data is retrieved from the hard drive. The restart is faster (contents retrieved from RAM) and with minimal power loss. Hybrid Sleep mode is a mix of sleep mode and hibernate, where the contents are stored in RAM and hard drive.

Some of the options available for Hibernate and Sleep in various OS are: Hibernate is defined as S4 in ACPI and sleep as S3. Hibernate and Sleep modes are supported in all operating systems where ACPI is supported. A hibernating system uses no power at all while a system in sleep mode consumes small but continuous power.Ī speed test of switching from sleep/hibernate mode to resume mode is performed in this video:

Power consumption: Lower in hibernate mode.

But a hibernating system needs comparatively more time to resume as it needs time to read back the data from the hard disk or other permanent memory storage. In sleep mode, since the data is stored in RAM, the resumption is immediate and no time is lost. In case of a power outage, any unsaved data is lost and cannot be recovered.

In sleep mode, the data is still in the RAM, which is volatile. During hibernation, data is automatically stored in a non-volatile memory before the hardware shuts down. Risk of data loss: Higher in sleep mode.Most laptops enter this mode when the machine is running on batteries and is closed. Only the CPU and the display need to be powered up. As a result the resumption on waking up is instantaneous. Hibernation provides the advantage of eliminating the need to save data before shutting down and restore the applications on power up.ĭuring sleep mode the computer cut power to subsystems that are not needed and places RAM into minimum power state. On start-up, data is read back to the RAM which takes about 10 seconds or more. Similar to shut down, a hibernating system needs more time to start up. The state of the computer upon resumption is the same before it enters hibernate or sleep mode.ĭuring hibernation, the hardware is completely powered down while the computer retains its state. Sleep mode is similar to Standby, your data is saving in memory, if there is an interruption on power, and all of the information in memory is lost. Power button and standby light indicator State of the computer

Windows 10 sleep vs hibernate mode