Sleep mode vs. hibernation power usage and safety [closed]

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?


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.


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.