Windows is annoyingly good at hiding where your storage goes. As someone who uses a 512GB laptop, I’m always on the lookout for ways to free that up. And while doing that last week, I realized Windows’ hibernation feature was using nearly 2% of the total storage for a feature I used occasionally.

So I did the obvious. I disabled hibernation, got the space back instantly, and I haven’t missed the feature one bit.

Hibernation is useful, but it comes at a cost

The price is your storage

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.

One important thing to note about disabling hibernation is that it also turns off Fast Startup. It’s Windows’ default setting that lets your PC boot faster after a shutdown. But since it relies on that same hiberfil.sys file, it won’t work once you delete it. The good thing is that on PCs running SSD, Fast Startup doesn’t help much anyway. In fact, Fast Startup is known to cause its own problems, so losing it might actually be a win.

I still get fast startups and my apps reopen automatically

Keep the benefits without the storage cost

Giving up hibernation might sound impractical, but I did a couple of things to make up for most of the convenience I lost. First, I enabled Windows’ restartable apps feature from Settings > Sign-in options > Automatically save my restartable apps and restart them when I sign back in. What this does is remember all the apps I had opened when I shut down and reopen those the next time I boot. This doesn’t work with all apps, though. It only supports Microsoft’s own apps like File Explorer, Paint, Notepad, and a handful of third-party apps. Thankfully, I use Edge, so this also reopens my browser tabs.

And to make up for the Fast Startup feature, I made a few tweaks, starting with the BIOS first. I enabled Fast Boot (not Windows’ Fast Startup), which basically skips a few unnecessary hardware checks during startup and saves a few seconds before Windows even loads. I also disabled startup apps that had no business launching the moment I logged in. This part helped the most because the startup apps list on my PC was unnecessarily long. I also cleaned up a few useless Windows services — mainly those that didn’t add any value.

Of course, all these tricks are not a true replacement for the hibernation feature. But considering I got 10GB of storage back and kept most of the benefits, I don’t mind the change.