Putting SSD’s to sleep

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My old pc used to take about 90 seconds to boot up, so I regularly used the sleep function whenever I left it unused for an hour or so. My new pc boots up in 20 seconds because the OS is on an SSD. What are the pros and cons of sleep versus shutdown when you have an SSD, apart from about 15 seconds wait time?

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Well there’s lots about SSD’s some of its folk lore, least in my experience anyway, like disable Hibernate, disable fast start up etc all supposed to make that all to expensive SSD last forever, although they have been coming down in price for years now, almost to the price of a regular spinning rust HDD.
Never had one give up the Ghost on me yet, even with heavy use. However if its Boot Start up time improvements that you crave, then what I have found restart’s the slowest of the lot 35-50 secs, Power off then Boot (power On) and Boom its there in under 15secs, resume from sleep something similar although I find there’s not much difference with power on/boot. Resume from Hibernate same as Sleep times although over the years HDD’s and SSD’s have tended to suffer from erratic resume performance with Win’s 7-10 with Hibernate on resume.
If I don’t use it for an extended period of time I shut them down, if you use “Wake on LAN” then sleeps the very setting to use. Quite a few systems i’ll RDP in to or retrieve Data via network so I will use sleep. But for the home Machine sat in the corner you can shut it down, although the purists will howl the Power Cycles will kill it (SSD) quicker. Say fire up 3-4 times or more a day maybe consider sleep as now, once, 2-3 times a week consider shutting down your call really. Some of the SSD’s at work have been going for approx. 10 years and really show no sign of giving up the Ghost anytime soon, although some are displaying one or two bad cells and are adequately over provisioned as a sombre note unlike an HDD an SSD will go all at once, yet to see it my self here, but there’s generally no warning according to some reports.

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OscarCP

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Well, internally, current SSDs vary wildly. And I mean a lot more than spinning HDDs produced in the last 10 years – this kind of thing is exactly where the variances will show.

This really is sleep vs hibernate vs Windows semi-hibernate vs full shutdown…

SSDs should on average cope with power cycles better than spinning HDDs – spin-up and spin-down stages are hard for bearings, motors and such, which SSDs don’t have.

BobbyB wrote:

unlike an HDD an SSD will go all at once, yet to see it my self here, but there’s generally no warning according to some reports.

Not quite so… Change “will” to “tends to”, for accuracy?

While the typical failure mode on a traditional HDD is gradual, they can also do the sudden death with no warning. Also electrically interesting failure modes if it’s the motor that breaks, may cause issues on the motherboard easily too.

Some SSDs do have gradual failure modes, too – and no bad block reports even when there clearly are bad blocks, on some. This is just uncommon… but saw one of these again this week.

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I find the fastest is to use hibernate all the time. Shutdown is very quick because apps are not closed. Resume is very fast because I don’t have to reload the 8 or 9 apps I always have running. SSD life is not affected by hibernating because SSDs have very long lives.

Ultimately everything fails, so a regular data backup and image backup to an external disk is essential IMO.

cheers, Paul

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Shutdown and resume / hardware restart speed obivously depends on hardware… and driver and firmware versions and settings.

I find that on complicated hardware, even on a new SSD the hibernate state write time can be quite measurable. And depending on what you use for disk encryption, that can cause a noticeable delay in the resume stage before you can start reading the hibernated state back from disk.

But, hibernate is a LOT more secure than sleep, particularly with disk encryption. In sleep, the keys may still be kept active in RAM (in slow-refresh keepalive mode) and accessible to a hardware hacker… with difficulty varying by device model. (I know a place that at least used to use just that as a debugging feature for their own hardware prototypes.)

There may also be ways to get at what was on screen just prior to entering sleep, depending on… well, various things – I’ve had that happen by accident on Windows 10 v1709.

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