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I was wondering roughly the power difference between hibernation and sleep mode? I know hibernation uses almost exactly the same amount of power as when the PC is off, but how about sleep mode?

Also, I don’t mind my PC going into hibernation. It’s just annoying having to wait a good ten minutes for it to load everything back into the RAM. So providing I were to leave it in sleep mode all the time, would it have a negative effect on my PCs health?

I currently have my PC running a good 10-15 hours straight per day. The rest of the time, it is sleeping/hibernating (hybrid sleep is set to 3 hours). What would your views be on this?

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    Hibernation doesn't just use "almost exactly the same amount of power as when the PC is off" - it uses exactly the same amount of power as when the PC is off. During hibernation, the PC is entirely in an off state. You can pull the power cord, remove the battery, and even go so far as to completely disassemble and reassemble the computer while it's hibernated. So long as it's re-assembled exactly the same (and there can even be some exceptions to this) it should re-boot just as well as if you'd set it to hibernate and then woken it back up without doing anything else to it.
    – Iszi
    Commented Nov 4, 2014 at 19:49
  • Hibernation just writes the RAM to disk, then uses a special boot process to restore the working state to RAM from the HDD.
    – Iszi
    Commented Nov 4, 2014 at 19:50
  • You're right there. I shouldn't have made that mistake c;
    – Gaben Newil
    Commented Nov 4, 2014 at 19:52
  • Voted to close as "Opinion-Based"/"Not Constructive", as previous duplicates have been: What is the impact of leaving a laptop in “sleep” mode (while on battery power)? (closed), Should I set my laptop to sleep/standby or hibernate when the battery is nearly dead? (closed/deleted) (need high rep to see)
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Commented Nov 4, 2014 at 20:08

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Sleep mode consumes much more power since the whole content of RAM is maintained, meaning the mainboard and all RAM modules are supplied with Power. A power failure would cause all data that are not saved to hard disk to lost. However no harm is done to the computer if left in sleep mode even over days.

Hibernate saves everything to hard disk before turning off the computer, then consuming almost no power. Also a power outage during hibernate will di no harm to your data.

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  • Losing data isn't a worry. My main concern is really the power usage and physical health of my PC after using purely sleep mode with no turn off
    – Gaben Newil
    Commented Nov 4, 2014 at 19:56
  • Usually sleep mode takes about 10 Watt, pretty much compared to 1 Watt when hibernate or turned off. However the PC will not be damaged by sleeping a long time.
    – user3767013
    Commented Nov 4, 2014 at 20:01
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When hibernating, the big difference is that your PC has shut down and is NOT pulling power. Another difference is that your data is saved to your hard disk and not RAM. This makes it safer, as your less likely to loose your current session, but it is a slower option since the system has to actually restart and restore data to RAM. I wouldn't view sleep mode as being bad for your computer though, but if something did go wrong, you would for sure lose your current session.

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