If you computer is real short on SSD space and your Windows OS is installed on it, and especially if you have large amounts of RAM on your system, you can free up SSD space by turning Windows Hibernate off.
When your computer hibernates it stores a full image of your memory in the file hiberfil.sys. This file is located normally in the top of your drive along with other system files like pagefile..sys, swapfile.sys (these files are needed don’t delete them). All of these files are hidden by default from the user until you turn on “show hidden files” in the Windows file manager.
Yes there are other ways to turn off hibernate (thru power saving options GUI – deleting the hiberfil.sys file is not one of them – it will just come back) but, the easiest way to turn off hibernate in my mind is:
- turn off hibernate is to run a DOS command window as Administrator
- issue the command “powercfg.exe /hibernate off
Immediately C:\hiberfil.sys is removed – whether you could see it or not and space is freed up on your OS disk drive – works with any kind of drive not just SSDs.
Again, this is really beneficial if you have lots of RAM and are short on disk space.
I don’t want to use hibernate and over the long run it has caused more problems that it resolved. Typically it takes a long time to restart from hibernate and frankly I’d rather have the space.
Hope this helps, Mike