Hibernation is useful, but it comes at a cost.
The price is your storage becomes smaller.
Hibernation feels like the ideal option for anyone who uses their PC daily and doesn't want to lose their open apps and files. You close the lid, Windows saves everything, uses almost no power, and picks up right where you left off when you’re back. It kind of gives you the quick resume of Sleep mode and the power saving of a full shutdown. But there’s a catch that most people miss.
Hibernation relies on a dedicated file named hiberfil.sys. Every time you hibernate your PC, Windows writes whatever data is in your memory to that file — and it’s not small. On my machine, it was close to 10GB. For you, that number can be higher or lower because Windows sizes it based on your PC’s total RAM, typically between 40% to 75%. So if you’ve got 16GB of RAM, expect the hibernation file to eat up anywhere from 6 to 12GB on your drive.
Of course, this won’t matter to everyone. On a 1TB HDD, that number is barely a rounding error. But on a budget laptop with only 256GB SSD, giving up that kind of storage can hurt — because that’s space you can’t use for anything else.
The worst part is that this hibernation file doesn’t actually shrink if you stop using the feature tomorrow. It just sits there, doing nothing until you actually hibernate. And the problem is, most people don’t realize it exists until they go digging for why their storage is disappearing.
Disabling hibernation gave me 10 GB of storage
It felt like finding free storage
The hiberfil.sys file lives at the root of your C: drive. You won’t see it by default though, since it’s a hidden system file. To find it, click View > Show > Hidden items. If you still don’t see it, open File Explorer Options, switch to the View tab, and uncheck Hide protected operating system files. But don’t bother trying to delete it from there. You’ll get some sort of error or Windows will simply recreate the file.
The right way to get rid of the hiberfil.sys file and free up storage is to disable the hibernation feature entirely. For that, open Command Prompt with administrative privileges and run the following command:
powercfg /hibernate off
To confirm it worked, head back to the C: drive in File Explorer and the file should be gone. You’ll also get the storage back instantly.
