Fett1138

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Hi,

This is my first time posting on Tom's Hardware. I have a new Corsair Force 3 120GB solid state drive with Windows 7 Ultimate installed. Every time I would put it to sleep, it would turn off and give me the "Windows did not shut down successfully" message. I talked to the people at Fry's (who have helped me out throughout building the computer), and they told me never to put the SSD to sleep. Sleep is a feature that I would really like to keep available, so I looked up the problem here (where I have also looked while building my computer, but never posted or created an account) and figured I'd try disabling hybrid sleep, now it sleeps like it should and comes back up without any problems. However, I just want to make sure that using regular sleep won't kill my SSD. This is my second SSD, as my first one (a Kingston) died, probably because of putting it to sleep, as I just learned, so I'm sure you can understand why I'm cautious.

Thanks,
Connor Montgomery
 
Solution
"Sleep" leaves programs and data in RAM, turns off the monitor and suspends the CPU. It still uses power to keep the data in RAM alive. If your system is battery powered and the batteries get too low, the system will dump RAM data to the system drive (SSD, if that's that the system is installed on) and then shut down completely. If data is still in RAM then restart is almost instant.

Hibernate writes programs and data to the system drive or SSD and then turns off the computer. It consumes no power. Restart is slower than in sleep mode because of the need to load programs and data back from the hard drive.

Hybrid sleep writes programs and data to the system drive or SSD for protection against power failures, but also keeps...
"Sleep" leaves programs and data in RAM, turns off the monitor and suspends the CPU. It still uses power to keep the data in RAM alive. If your system is battery powered and the batteries get too low, the system will dump RAM data to the system drive (SSD, if that's that the system is installed on) and then shut down completely. If data is still in RAM then restart is almost instant.

Hibernate writes programs and data to the system drive or SSD and then turns off the computer. It consumes no power. Restart is slower than in sleep mode because of the need to load programs and data back from the hard drive.

Hybrid sleep writes programs and data to the system drive or SSD for protection against power failures, but also keeps data alive in RAM so that restart is almost instant. It consumes power to keep RAM alive, ans is designed for desktop computers for which that isn't usually an issue.

Hibernate or hybrid sleep will use up a lot of the write lifetime of an SSD if you do it often enough. Sleep mode won't, unless your computer is battery operated and you regularly leave it in sleep mode long enough for the battery to run down which forces data and programs to be dumped to the SSD.
 
Solution

flong

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Hey I don't want to hijack this thread but I have a question that is in line with the OP's subject. I have the Corsair GT Force 3 and I am wondering how to tell which setting my computer is on.

It appears that sleep is the only setting that will not prematurely use up the flash memory on the SSD because even hybrid sleep writes to the SSD.
When my computer is in "sleep" mode, it is still running - therefore I think that it is not in "hybrid sleep" mode.

Anyway thanks for any help to clarify these issues.
 

Fett1138

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I went to Control Panel>Power Options>Edit Plan Settings>Change Advanced Power Settings in Windows 7.
 

flong

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Kool I found it - what is the best sleep for an SSD, if any? Should I allow hybrid sleep or regular sleep or no sleep?
 
See my post above. If you want to minimize writes to your SSD then use plain Sleep mode. Just be aware that it consumes a few watts of power in order to maintain data in RAM.
 

flong

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OK got it - I am sorry I forgot your earlier post. You have been very helpful - Thank You.
 

Fett1138

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Thank you very much, I disabled hibernation altogether and now it works fine. I'm sure you can understand my anxiety towards the situation, as I mentioned, I had another SSD that died a slow death most-likely because of hybrid sleep. I've learned a lot thanks to this though. Thank you both for your help.