Saving HDD Space by Disabling Hibernate - arcdev/engram404 GitHub Wiki

originally posted 2017-05-31 at https://engram404.net/saving-hdd-space-by-disabling-hibernate/

Short on disk space? Never use the hibernate feature in Windows?
(Not sure what the '"Hibernate'" feature is? Check out How-To Geek's excellent write-up: What's the Difference Between Sleep and Hibernate in Windows?)

Ever notice the hidden file, hiberfil.sys, in the root of your OS drive (usually C)?
It's generally HUGE. (By observation it seems to be a little more than half of your physical RAM. So if you've got 16GB of RAM, then the file likely consumes a bit more than 8GB. On a limited size drive, say 256GB, that'll be over 3% of your already limited space.)

Let's just disable it.

Fire up a command prompt as Administrator and run this:
powercfg /hibernate off

That's it – you've just freed up more space.

(Here's the original reference on MSDN)