MacOS – Do I need Hibernate option ON for the Retina Macbook Pro

hibernatemacbook promacossleep-wake

I have a Retina MBP and have the following settings using pmset -g

As you can see below, standby is 1 and hibernationmode is 3, meaning that I have DEEP SLEEP turned on, after 7200 seconds.

Do I need to have hibernation on ? or off ? I read somewhere the SSD don't need hibernation option, and can save memory (which is saved in /var/vm/sleepimage I'm assuming). Is this true ?

If I don't need it, how can I turn it off ? Because the settings I currently have using pmset -g is confusing, and not sure if they should look this way, can you inform me if I have weird values there ?

On power : 

Active Profiles:
Battery Power       -1
AC Power        -1*
Currently in use:
 standbydelay         7200
 standby              1
 womp                 1
 halfdim              1
 hibernatefile        /var/vm/sleepimage
 darkwakes            1
 gpuswitch            2
 networkoversleep     0
 disksleep            0
 sleep                0
 autopoweroffdelay    14400
 hibernatemode        3
 autopoweroff         1
 ttyskeepawake        1
 displaysleep         60
 acwake               0
 lidwake              1

and on battery :

Battery Power       -1*
AC Power        -1
Currently in use:
 standbydelay         7200
 standby              1
 halfdim              1
 hibernatefile        /var/vm/sleepimage
 darkwakes            0
 gpuswitch            2
 disksleep            0
 sleep                180
 autopoweroffdelay    14400
 hibernatemode        3
 autopoweroff         1
 ttyskeepawake        1
 displaysleep         5
 acwake               0
 lidwake              1

Thanks !

Best Answer

No - almost no one is so starved for battery power that full on Hibernation mode makes sense for them. So for any Mac with a battery - keep with mode 3 and avoid modes 0 and 25.

I never change Apple's default settings unless I have a reason that I can write down in a sentence as to why I want it changed. In this case, there's no real benefit to me for the alternate modes (and certainly not for any further unsupported combination that the full man page and pmset allows)

Here is the manual page for pmset which has very excellent help and documentation on hibernate mode (I wish all man pages were this awesome):

 We do not recommend modifying hibernation settings. Any changes you make
 are not supported. If you choose to do so anyway, we recommend using one
 of these three settings. For your sake and mine, please don't use any-
 thing other 0, 3, or 25.

 hibernatemode = 0 (binary 0000) by default on supported desktops. The
 system will not back memory up to persistent storage. The system must
 wake from the contents of memory; the system will lose context on power
 loss. This is, historically, plain old sleep.

 hibernatemode = 3 (binary 0011) by default on supported portables. The
 system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and
 will power memory during sleep. The system will wake from memory, unless
 a power loss forces it to restore from disk image.

 hibernatemode = 25 (binary 0001 1001) is only settable via pmset. The
 system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and
 will remove power to memory. The system will restore from disk image. If
 you want "hibernation" - slower sleeps, slower wakes, and better battery
 life, you should use this setting.

So, as you can see - Mode 0 (binary 0000) is not really helpful for a retina MBP and doesn't save any battery. Mode 3 (binary 0011) is the default and what I recommend. If you didn't mind a slower sleep and higher amount of data written to the drive each time you enter sleep (as opposed to the write happening once sleep has drained the power to a low warning level around 5% reserve) you might try using Mode 25 to see if your slower sleep/wake is worth the extra battery life preservation since the Mac won't sleep but instead hibernates all the time with power off when the normal sleep time comes.

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