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Sleep vs. hibernation on an Intel 320 SSD

A

Anonemous

Diamond Member
Been using a Intel 320 for almost two months and I've noticed for some odd reason that my laptop will crash (freeze up and won't respond) almost daily if I put my computer on sleep mode and open up flash video websites like youtube. It won't instantly crash on the first video but it will eventually crash.

So I switched over to hibernation (yes it takes awhile to load up) and I noticed I can go on indefinitely without crashing for almost 2 weeks now.

Is something wrong with the hardware or is it a driver issue?

ps. Using Chrome/ Win7 home premium 64bit/8gig ram/i5-430M
 
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Hibernation creates a file (hiberfil.sys) that is saved on the SSD. That file must be read and acted upon to restore. Sleep is basically a power reduction - sort of suspended animation. Personally, I can't see using either with a laptop that has a SSD. The time required for a cold boot is probably around 30 seconds. With that in mind, I would turn the machine off and not mess with either sleep or hibernation.
 
Over the years most SSDs have had issues with sleep. Hibernation will also write the same amount of RAM to the SSD everytime you hibernate. This is completely unnecessary in my opinion.

I echo that of corkyg. A cold boot on a system with an SSD does not take very long and is the best option.
 
Seems like the obvious quick fix would be to not let it sleep when you have those types of data being loaded at resume. Just close the apps and open them as needed after the system has awoken.

Hybrid sleep can also help as well.
 
I doubt it's the SSD. It's more likely your RAM. Sleep keeps everything in RAM. Hibernate pushing what's in RAM to disk then loads it. This allows you to unplug the power supply and battery and still resume. Yes it can also be your disk controller. I'd actually do a quick check of your power options. Sleep with your power option at balanced, if it's crashes, try it set to 'high performance.' The difference between the two is the PCI link power savings. It's usually off with 'high performance.' If it still happens... test your RAM with Memtest.

Also... when you sleep, there is hybrid sleep, which is sleep+hibernation. It's on by default, but it sounds like you have it off. Try turning it on to see if it still crashes. Best of luck. As a fellow laptop user sleep without hybrid sleep is something I don't want to lose. Being able to sleep your laptop with the fans off then open your laptop lid and it's ready within 2 seconds for p0rn surfing is something I'd want to keep.
 
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My wife cant sleep her laptop with a Corsair Force SSD in it. For the record no Corsair ssd has every been able to sleep on any of my laptops.

I've since been purchasing Intel SSD which have been working extremely well for all my laptops. It's a surprise that you have been having sleeping issues, but it's an age old problem with SSD drives dispite the Intel SSD having a better track record.
 
My wife's 320 series has no issues with sleep/resume, and she loves it b/c she might spend 2-3 hours working on a project, then get called away by a "little kid emergency", then get 15 minutes, then more mommy duties, etc etc etc all day long. She typically doesn't close anything out until unless she has to.
 
Anonemous said:
Is something wrong with the hardware or is it a driver issue?
Click to expand...

Yes.

It's impossible to tell which from the information given. It's most likely a driver issue but some hardware just doesn't deal with sleep well.

corkyg said:
Hibernation creates a file (hiberfil.sys) that is saved on the SSD. That file must be read and acted upon to restore. Sleep is basically a power reduction - sort of suspended animation. Personally, I can't see using either with a laptop that has a SSD. The time required for a cold boot is probably around 30 seconds. With that in mind, I would turn the machine off and not mess with either sleep or hibernation.
Click to expand...

That's ignoring all of the extra time to restart all of your apps after bootup. I sleep my notebook daily and do everything I can to avoid rebooting or shutting it down.
 
I have been switching back and forth between shutdown and hibernation. Each time, I go back to hibernation because I don't need to close and reopen the apps.
 
Well I suspect it may also be the ram but I don't get crashes that requires a reboot anymore. If a flash video crashes now, it just closes chrome (ever since I switched to hibernate). If I put it to sleep, and a video crashes it will just freeze the entire computer requiring a reboot.


razel said:
I doubt it's the SSD. It's more likely your RAM. Sleep keeps everything in RAM. Hibernate pushing what's in RAM to disk then loads it. This allows you to unplug the power supply and battery and still resume. Yes it can also be your disk controller. I'd actually do a quick check of your power options. Sleep with your power option at balanced, if it's crashes, try it set to 'high performance.' The difference between the two is the PCI link power savings. It's usually off with 'high performance.' If it still happens... test your RAM with Memtest.

Also... when you sleep, there is hybrid sleep, which is sleep+hibernation. It's on by default, but it sounds like you have it off. Try turning it on to see if it still crashes. Best of luck. As a fellow laptop user sleep without hybrid sleep is something I don't want to lose. Being able to sleep your laptop with the fans off then open your laptop lid and it's ready within 2 seconds for p0rn surfing is something I'd want to keep.
Click to expand...


I'll try and test that. It's just weird, it only crashes randomly on flash videos (when I put it to sleep and awaken it) and nothing else. It doesn't immediately crash but it eventually does sometimes within multiple sleep->on events.
 
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yah i have problems with ich9 but oddly none of my mac's have problems. i think its crappy dell drivers honestly. I don't sleep the pc's at all now.

also the ethernet card would freak out on the dell (inspiron 530) when coming out of sleep. junky realtek card i think.
 
I've been hibernating Intel SSDs and ripping them out of PCs, placing in other drives and starting the system up, shutting down or hibernating that drive, then putting the Intel SSD back in and starting it up for YEARS. Not one hiccup.

There is little point to sleep or hibernate outside of shaving some time off your startup. I can see why people would want to sleep their laptop upon closing the lid, even with a SSD.. it's SUPPOSED to work right, but many cheaper SSDs do not.

Having a 320 drive, which is one of the most trusted controllers out there, you can do whatever you want. They are virtually identical to my G2s. Other than wanting more space (512GB+), I have no desire to upgrade or replace my drives.

Your issue might be a power management issue, I'd eliminate variables starting with using Firefox instead of Chrome. I used to sleep my Intel 40GB all the time and never had any issues like what you described.
 
Many many laptops have issued bios updates to address S3 resume with SSDs. I'd start there if you haven't already.

From what you tell me though, there is very little reason to suspect the SSD over say the gpu or a program that has a memory leak.
 
It should also be mentioned that there are many software/driver related issues involving sleep transition problems.

Might be worth going on a "hot-fix hunt" and eliminating the browsers used for simple trial and error purposes as they have also been known to cause issue as well.
 
Just to throw it in, I sleep my notebook with a 120gb intel 320 constantly without issue. If the machine is idle for 2 minutes I put it to sleep, since I frequently walk away in the middle of something. However, I rarely hibernate and almost always shut down if I'll be away longer than an hour.

Anyway, there doesn't seem to be enough info to determine if it's the ssd or not. Since flash is gpu accelerated, I'd guess the problem is gpu drivers.
 
Nothinman said:
That's ignoring all of the extra time to restart all of your apps after bootup. I sleep my notebook daily and do everything I can to avoid rebooting or shutting it down.
Click to expand...

I can see that in your case . . . however, I don't ever work that way. I close my apps as soon as I get what I want from them. Usually never more than 2 open at a time. Just goes to show that there is great diversity in how we use computers.
 
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