Are there downsides to Windows 8 Hybrid Shutdown?

Are there any downside to Windows 8 not doing a "full" shutdown? Would it be good practice to occasionally do a full shutdown to do a full system initialization at boot?

If I'm already booting from SSD is there still a point to using Fast Startup?

Solution 1:

A Full Boot differs from a Fast Boot in terms of services and driver loading. Both of them are saved into a hiberfile when shutdown and just resumed when Fast Booted. I can olny see the needing of a Full Boot if you noticed radical changes in drivers(a driver update for example) or the installation of a lot of new Windows Services.

Fortunatelly even when installing new services or new drivers Windows 8 will know about that and will automatically load the new one if it "misses" the hit of a hyberfile open try, so, in a few words, it's kind of subjective, but I don't think it is necessarily to make Full Reboots of your system unless you think you need for some specific reason such as driver update or even due to performance issues.

Solution 2:

In addition to what Diogo and Root already said, you also should perform a full shutdown if you have another OS installed or if you plan to boot from an optical disc or a flash drive.

Any change made to the partitions visible to Windows while it is hibernating can result in data corruption. The hybrid shutdown was initially called Logoff + Hibernate, so suppose this still applies. Better safe than sorry...