Slow to Wake up SSD from Hibernation

[know of fence]

In short: Have you experienced any sluggishness starting a PC from Hibernation (suspend-to-drive)? For me Windows7 takes more that twice as long to wake up as a normal system boot up.

Some time ago following the SSD hype I bought an Intel 2nd generation 34nm 80MB MLC SSD, which works as the system drive with win7.
As someone very power conscious I measured that putting my PC in stand-by, does almost nothing to decrease the power consumption, so I was hoping that hibernation to a fast SSD would allow to turn the machine on and off quickly when needed. However the system requires about 2 minutes to wake up, far longer than a HDD would take.

So have you tried hibernation to and from your SSD drive? [Alt+F4] [Shift+H]

Update: Problem was resolved by removing junk startup processes, performance was increased additionally by switching the drive from "IDE" to AHCI mode (both in Windows registry and in BIOS)

 

[Coup27]

I have an X25-M G2 but I never use stand by/sleep or hibernation. To be quite honest, my rig only takes around 45 seconds to boot from cold so I don't see the point. Add to that the massive write you'll be doing to your SSD to save your current session, pointless additional wear imo.

I don't think Intel drives suffer the same way as Sandforce drives but sleep and hibernation seems to be a shortcut to SSD failures in the longrun. Worth considering.

 

[razel]

Sounds like the stand-by on your PC isn't the stand-by that most of us enjoy. The stand-by I'm thinking of is the one where your fans are off and there's just enough power to power your RAM and other motherboard necessities to wake it back up. I think it's called S3 sleep.

Win7 does have great troubleshooting to help you diagnose. Try going to 'Performance Information and Tools' and 'Advanced Tools' to see of any logs about notices when going to sleep.

 

[Idontcare]

Welcome to the forums know of fence! :thumbsup:

How much ram is in your rig? The hibernate file will be roughly the same size as your ram.

What does your AS SSD or CrystalDiskMark sequential read scores look like? Are you getting these kinds of numbers?

If your SSD is functioning correctly and you are seeing ~250 MB/s sequential reads in CrystalDiskMark then your "resume from hibernate" time should be rather quick.

1GB of ram restored every 4 seconds. At most, for 16GB ram setup, you should be looking at around 64 seconds to resume from hibernate (plus the BIOS initialization time, which itself should not be any more than maybe 10 seconds).

 

[know of fence]

In reply to Coup27

I kind of understand the general sentiment towards these suspend states, the lack of an uninterruptible power supply or laptop battery makes these things a liability for desktop PCs, but being able to start where you left off, in (about 15 seconds) without going through all those windows start up aggravations makes it worth it IMHO.
Since you have a similar drive, I wish you could test hibernate at least once and check the time it takes.

In reply to Rezel

The S3 sleep (or stand-by) state takes a lot of energy. A typical notebook doesn't last over night in stand-by, before it runs out of power and slips into hibernation.
Additionally I have a hunch that Motherboards have to compromise between an economical S3-sleep and/or a economical Off-state (<0,5W). At least my MSI Bios offers this option. Apparently one can't have both.

In reply to Idontcare

Following your link I looked into stuff (stopping short of updating firmware), the benchmarks are very roughly up to intel specs.
For my 4GByte RAM system it should take 20 seconds at max, instead I stare at the whizzing windows logo for about 2 minutes straight, i thought it may be a common problem, but it seems nobody even tried hibernation.

http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/5976/benchssd2.png

 

[Coup27]

I actually have the same drive as you, the 80GB X25-M G2.

I will test my hibernation for you this evening and update this post with the result.

 

[corkyg]

I would never use hibernation with a SSD in a notebook. Hibernation creates unnecessary writes, and if used a lot, can decrease the lifespan of the SSD. Sleep if you must, but on a laptop, the best thing is to turn it off.

 

[Coup27]

I actually think that the benchmark you have posted is substantially less than it should be. I have the same X25-M G2 80GB drive as you and after 8 months of use, and running the optimizer once a week on Windows 7 x74 with latest Intel RST driver, here are my scores:

Please can you check if you SSD is aligned correctly? To do this:

Open a command prompt (start menu > run > cmd)
type: DISKPART
type: LIST DISK (note disk # of your SSD, should be 0)
type: SELECT DISK 0 (if 0 is your SSD)
type: LIST PARTITION

then either screenshot or type out what it says. To close, type: EXIT [enter] then EXIT again [enter].

To be honest, with your scores how they are, and the issues you are having with hibernation, plus the comments you have made about 'startup aggravations' it just sounds like your installation would benefit a lot from a format.

What firmware do you have in your SSD? Is your system in AHCI or IDE/compatibility mode?

 

[Idontcare]

For my 4GByte RAM system it should take 20 seconds at max, instead I stare at the whizzing windows logo for about 2 minutes straight, i thought it may be a common problem, but it seems nobody even tried hibernation.

Yeah it definitely sounds like something is jacked with your rig.

I have the 160GB G2, Win7 Ult x64, 8GB ram, and my hibernate restore process takes all of maybe 20-30s.

The fact that your setup is basically "hanging" on resume makes me think maybe there is a device in your system, like a network connection or a PCI card of some sort, that is timing out when it gets powered-up again and windows is taking time to "renegotiate" etc.

I had a raid card (areca 1280ML) in my rig that for whatever reason was causing windows to timeout when it was supposed to shutdown. Shutdown's would take a ridiculous amount time, around 5 minutes.

I recommend you go into Event Viewer and see if you have any notices of hardware timeouts or some such going on during your hibernate resumes.

 

[razel]

The S3 sleep (or stand-by) state takes a lot of energy. A typical notebook doesn't last over night in stand-by, before it runs out of power and slips into hibernation.
Additionally I have a hunch that Motherboards have to compromise between an economical S3-sleep and/or a economical Off-state (<0,5W). At least my MSI Bios offers this option. Apparently one can't have both.

Ummm... S3 sleep in my opinion doesn't use much energy. On laptops I own and use, when it's on and the screen is closed, they average about 10 watts. It's barely a blip or two of wattage when it's sleeping. I'm sure newer laptops especially the Sandy Bridge and Atom variants use even less.

I've travelled with a 2005 era 17" laptop and got about 90 minutes of usage over a 16 hour flight. When I landed it still had enough power for 10-20 minutes of usage. Laptop owner know very well that it's all about screen brightness and the health of your battery. It doesn't matter how much it's charged, it's how healthy the battery is.

I think you have to diagnose what sapping power from your system. At this point only you can figure it out.

 

[Voo]

I would never use hibernation with a SSD in a notebook. Hibernation creates unnecessary writes, and if used a lot, can decrease the lifespan of the SSD. Sleep if you must, but on a laptop, the best thing is to turn it off.

Yeah how horrible. 4-8gb of extra writes! If I did that 30-40times every day I may actually notice the lifespan decrease - ah well, probably still not noticeable.


I can say that for my 160gb G2 Intel hibernation is working just fine, so I agree with IDC - check out the event viewer, there should be some events if some driver takes too long to start.

 

[corkyg]

Yeah how horrible. 4-8gb of extra writes! If I did that 30-40times every day I may actually notice the lifespan decrease - ah well, probably still not noticeable.

That is true - but somehow I have the feeling that a cold boot with an SSD will be as fast or faster than a hibernation restore. And, the hiberfil.sys takes up a good bit of space on the SSD. This can be critical on a laptop.

Anyway, I have no qualms about anyone else using hibernation - I will never use it. Seen too many cases where restoration got hung up.

 

[Termie]

Ummm... S3 sleep in my opinion doesn't use much energy. On laptops I own and use, when it's on and the screen is closed, they average about 10 watts. It's barely a blip or two of wattage when it's sleeping. I'm sure newer laptops especially the Sandy Bridge and Atom variants use even less.

I've travelled with a 2005 era 17" laptop and got about 90 minutes of usage over a 16 hour flight. When I landed it still had enough power for 10-20 minutes of usage. Laptop owner know very well that it's all about screen brightness and the health of your battery. It doesn't matter how much it's charged, it's how healthy the battery is.

I think you have to diagnose what sapping power from your system. At this point only you can figure it out.

Agreed. S3 sleep does not use much energy. I have my system plugged into a Kill-a-Watt meter, so I know exactly what it's using. In sleep, it uses 3 watts, in hibernate, it would use 1w, but I disabled hibernation for a whole host of reasons (barely faster than full boot, didn't want the hibernation file taking up space on the boot SSD, along with the issue of additional writes to the drive). OP, just check your sleep mode and reconsider your use of hibernation. Yes, 2 minutes is too long, but even when I used to use hibernation, it was only a few seconds faster than a full boot, because it has to reload the bios anyway.

 

[Idontcare]

I use hibernate on my desktop solely for purposes of having the UPS hibernate the rig if/when power goes out.

It probably gets used about once a month on average.

 

[know of fence]

Thanks everyone for your support.
- installed Intel SSD Toolbox, ran tests/trim [v]
- updated firmware [v] -> slightest benchmark improvement
- disabled write cache [v]
- disabled system restore [v]
- checked Partition alligment->offset divisible by 4096 (results below) [v] thanks Coup27
Open a command prompt (start menu > run > cmd)
type: DISKPART
type: LIST DISK (note disk # of your SSD, should be 0)
type: SELECT DISK 0 (if 0 is your SSD)
type: LIST PARTITION

- Running in IDE (not AHCI) mode (according to Bios settings RAID mode -> IDE)
- disabled startup junk processes (like open office and java updater) [x]
So this did the trick, PC now resumes from hibernation in about 30 seconds.
I may try to narrow down which one of the dozen processes is to blame, but for now i'm quite happy.
Also thanks for the tip with the windows event viewer, Idontcare

 

[Coup27]

- Running in IDE (not AHCI) mode (according to Bios settings RAID mode -> IDE)

You should really be running in AHCI mode and not IDE. AHCI mode has several performance benefits over IDE and will be faster.

The snag is if you simply switch the BIOS to AHCI and load Windows you will get a BSOD. AHCI should be selected before a fresh install is made.

If you Google, there is a way of doing a registry hack in Windows, then booting into BIOS, changing to AHCI and installing probably the Intel RST driver but this is not something I have done. It's certainly worth investgating.

Your benchmark scores are still a lot lower than mine. Some of this will be down to AHCI, esp the 4k QD32, I dont think that would be responsible for the lower 4k and seq reads. Personally, now you're on the latest firmware, I would still secure erase, change to AHCI in BIOS and reload. Depends how much hassle that is for you.

 

[Termie]

I actually think that the benchmark you have posted is substantially less than it should be. I have the same X25-M G2 80GB drive as you and after 8 months of use, and running the optimizer once a week on Windows 7 x74 with latest Intel RST driver, here are my scores:

Please can you check if you SSD is aligned correctly? To do this:

Open a command prompt (start menu > run > cmd)
type: DISKPART
type: LIST DISK (note disk # of your SSD, should be 0)
type: SELECT DISK 0 (if 0 is your SSD)
type: LIST PARTITION

then either screenshot or type out what it says. To close, type: EXIT [enter] then EXIT again [enter].

To be honest, with your scores how they are, and the issues you are having with hibernation, plus the comments you have made about 'startup aggravations' it just sounds like your installation would benefit a lot from a format.

What firmware do you have in your SSD? Is your system in AHCI or IDE/compatibility mode?

You should really be running in AHCI mode and not IDE. AHCI mode has several performance benefits over IDE and will be faster.

The snag is if you simply switch the BIOS to AHCI and load Windows you will get a BSOD. AHCI should be selected before a fresh install is made.

If you Google, there is a way of doing a registry hack in Windows, then booting into BIOS, changing to AHCI and installing probably the Intel RST driver but this is not something I have done. It's certainly worth investgating.

Your benchmark scores are still a lot lower than mine. Some of this will be down to AHCI, esp the 4k QD32, I dont think that would be responsible for the lower 4k and seq reads. Personally, now you're on the latest firmware, I would still secure erase, change to AHCI in BIOS and reload. Depends how much hassle that is for you.

I think his benchmarks are fine, actually. In fact, they're very close to mine on the same drive, and I'm on AHCI, the latest Intel drivers, and I run Intel's SSD tool weekly. Your 4K times were unusually high, I'd say. Anyway, I wouldn't bother switching to AHCI for the performance - but I might do it for trim, which affects lifespan of the drive. Up to the OP to decide - I can confirm, however, that the registry tweak to avoid the bluescreen does in fact work, and it's santioned and automated by Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

 

[Voo]

AHCI and trim still don't have anything in common per se and the Intel drivers support TRIM in IDE just fine.

 

[Termie]

AHCI and trim still don't have anything in common per se and the Intel drivers support TRIM in IDE just fine.

I was not aware of that. This forum thread seems to confirm that: http://communities.intel.com/message/76399. After reading the second to last entry (which is quite detailed), I'm still not sure if TRIM works automatically in Win7 in IDE mode.

 

[zuffy]

That is true - but somehow I have the feeling that a cold boot with an SSD will be as fast or faster than a hibernation restore. And, the hiberfil.sys takes up a good bit of space on the SSD. This can be critical on a laptop.

Anyway, I have no qualms about anyone else using hibernation - I will never use it. Seen too many cases where restoration got hung up.

I did a test on my laptop, resume hibernation vs fresh windows startup time. It was 20 seconds vs 23 seconds. The hibernation would have been faster if I have 4GB vs 8GB of RAM. Since it's only 3 seconds, I went back to shutdown now. It's quicker in the shutdown vs going into hibernation. I guess if I account for the shutdown, it even out at the end.

 

[Voo]

After reading the second to last entry (which is quite detailed), I'm still not sure if TRIM works automatically in Win7 in IDE mode.

The last entry is fine, although not absolutely correct about who is sending the command. To use TRIM the OS, the driver and the drive itself have to support it (the post ignores the driver part; the OS alone isn't enough). So the answer is: Depends on your driver.

Intel's IDE drivers do support TRIM, AMD's don't and MS IDE's drivers.. umn pretty sure it does too.

 

[know of fence]

I think his benchmarks are fine, actually. In fact, they're very close to mine on the same drive, and I'm on AHCI, the latest Intel drivers, and I run Intel's SSD tool weekly. Your 4K times were unusually high, I'd say. Anyway, I wouldn't bother switching to AHCI for the performance -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Thanks for the link.
- Having switched from IDE to AHCI [v], following those instructions I see a significant increase in benchmark scores, particularly multi-threaded small file read performance:
sequential read up 32&#37;,
64 treads 4k writes up 1000%,
meta benchmark score up 145%.
Whether there is an increase or not, may depend on what exactly that IDE setting in BIOS really means: I'm referring to that long post about Trim in IDE mode on the Intel forums, which Termie posted above. It also includes similar benchmarking results: before and after.



And also thanks to ALL of you for the explanations, this all has been very illuminating and productive.

 

[corkyg]

I did a test on my laptop, resume hibernation vs fresh windows startup time. It was 20 seconds vs 23 seconds. The hibernation would have been faster if I have 4GB vs 8GB of RAM. Since it's only 3 seconds, I went back to shutdown now. It's quicker in the shutdown vs going into hibernation. I guess if I account for the shutdown, it even out at the end.

Good work, Zuffy! The 3 seconds or so really does not justify using hibernation if you have a SSD boot drive. That's what this thread is supposed to be about. I venture to say that over the long run, it will be more reliable and better for your laptop.

 

[Voo]

I did a test on my laptop, resume hibernation vs fresh windows startup time. It was 20 seconds vs 23 seconds. The hibernation would have been faster if I have 4GB vs 8GB of RAM. Since it's only 3 seconds, I went back to shutdown now. It's quicker in the shutdown vs going into hibernation. I guess if I account for the shutdown, it even out at the end.

And you included the startup of all applications, windows and co in there as well? If yes, interesting results - quite different with my Intel G2. If not - how exactly is this an useful comparison?

 

[corkyg]

Voo, we're talking about waking up from Hibernation, and this case shows there is not much difference between that and a cold boot. If that is the case, why hibernate? Hibernation restores all functions, apps, etc., that were running when it was imposed. Cold boot likewise. Remember - we're talking laptop with SSD, not desktop.

Just do this - forget all that benchmark stuff. Hibernate. Then put a stop watch on wake up. Compare that to your cold boot time.