SF: I’m sure that it’s probably related to the relatively large amount of RAM the box has; still, I’ve got a 7200RPM SATA HD, so it shouldn’t be slower than a typical desktop hard drive nowadays. It does certainly seem to be I/O (or seeking)-bound somewhere; though the hiberfil.sys doesn’t appear to be fragmented sufficiently to account for that. I wonder if the hibernate support also bothers persisting non-allocated (or those devoted to filesystem read caching) physical memory regions to disk; that might account for extra, possibly unnecessary time wasted during a hibernate/hybrid sleep cycle.

Still, given Vista’s memory usage, I would expect that most users will be having non-small quantities of RAM on their new laptops. I think this is where the new hybrid flash/magnetic hard drives are supposed to help out a bit, but they don’t appear to have a great deal of market penetration at this point.

For now, I’m probably just going to disable hybrid sleep and explicitly use hibernate when I really need to cut power (e.g. switching out batteries).

As for hybrid sleep taking a long time; it could simply be a combination of having a large amount of memory and a slower hard drive (since laptop computers do have slower ones). Also, if the file on the hard drive that it saves the memory contents onto is fragmented for some reason (it does happen sometimes), then that can further increase the amount of time it takes.