Did hybrid sleep kill my SSD?

[Jesper Kaas]

A 1 1/2 year old SSD stopped working recently. Would not boot, but
some files could be read off it.
Can the reason for the early retirement be that I put the PC to sleep
many times a day, whenever leaving it for longer than it takes to make
a cup of tea? I had not heard of "Hybrid sleep", and that was actually
turned on. If I understand it correct, a file the size of installed
RAM (4 GB in this case) will then be saved every time the PC is put to
sleep.
Got a new SSD for free from the supplier, and continue to put the
animal to sleep maybe 5-10 times a day, but have disabled hybrid
sleep. It should be safe then, right?

 

[VanguardLH]

A 1 1/2 year old SSD stopped working recently. Would not boot, but
some files could be read off it.
Can the reason for the early retirement be that I put the PC to sleep
many times a day, whenever leaving it for longer than it takes to make
a cup of tea? I had not heard of "Hybrid sleep", and that was actually
turned on. If I understand it correct, a file the size of installed
RAM (4 GB in this case) will then be saved every time the PC is put to
sleep.
Got a new SSD for free from the supplier, and continue to put the
animal to sleep maybe 5-10 times a day, but have disabled hybrid
sleep. It should be safe then, right?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/ssds-no-more-reliable-than-hard-drives/1483
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

Flash memory incurs oxide stress on writes hence the need for wear
levelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling) and remapping of
failed memory blocks (just like remapping of bad sectors on magnetic
media). From the Tom's Hardware article, an SSD *should* last 18 years
that experiences 10GB/day of writes. So how many writes in GB does your
SSD experience? Maybe you're incurring 100GB of writes per day so the
lifespan is down to just 1.8 years. It's probably not linear but you
get the idea: the more your write, the more reduced is longevity. 4GB
isn't that much unless, of course, you're power cycling the SSD every
minute which thereafter immediately comes back up (i.e., the power mode
bounces) so you'd be writing 5.8TB every day. You never gave a clue as
to the volume of writes to your SSD but then it's likely you didn't
monitor that volume. However, you do know (or can find out) the
interval at which the low-power hybrid sleep will activate. I don't how
you prepare tea. Perhaps you start with cold water and heat over a wood
fire to bring to a boil and then steep the tea for many minutes to make
it strong. It takes me 5 minutes using a microwave and then add a brew
bag and I like mine a bit weak. 5-minute power mode bouncing (since I
don't know how long you leave the computer in sleep mode) means you're
writing 1.1TB/day just for the hibernate file, and then there is how you
USE your computer that would up the write volume to the SSD. Only you
know or can find out how much write volume you're impinging on that SSD.

Note in the articles that failure isn't just due to the flash memory
itself but also in the interface logic which is using the same type of
components as for HDD interfaces. Stats on HDD failure extend over 50
years whereas stats on SSD failure is just a couple years old.
Obviously the marketing hype is trying to sell the more profitable SSDs
so they are bent to lie, misrepresent, or exaggerate. SSDs are much
faster on reads; however, they are slower than HDDs on writes. The
assumption is that your setup performs much more reads than writes to
exhibit an overall speed increase in using SSDs.

For now, just put the failure to infant mortality unless you know that
your write volume has been huge.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

A 1 1/2 year old SSD stopped working recently. Would not boot, but
some files could be read off it.
Can the reason for the early retirement be that I put the PC to sleep
many times a day, whenever leaving it for longer than it takes to make
a cup of tea? I had not heard of "Hybrid sleep", and that was actually
turned on. If I understand it correct, a file the size of installed
RAM (4 GB in this case) will then be saved every time the PC is put to
sleep.
Got a new SSD for free from the supplier, and continue to put the
animal to sleep maybe 5-10 times a day, but have disabled hybrid
sleep. It should be safe then, right?

Hybrid sleep is really nothing more than the regular sleep mode, and the
regular hibernate mode combined into one. In sleep mode, the PC is
suspended to RAM, while in hibernate it is suspended to disk (either
hard disk or SSD). In Hybrid mode, a copy of the suspension image is put
both on the disk and RAM. It's mainly useful for areas where there are a
lot of power outages, and if a power outage happens while in the middle
of sleep, you can still recover the state from hibernate file.

I've been using hybrid sleep on again off again for many months with my
SSD, doesn't seem to have made any difference to it. Have you been
monitoring its SMART health status before it died? There are many
resident utilities that can warn you of imminent failure of either hard
disks or SSD's. One such utility is called Hard Disk Sentinel, another
is Crystal Disk Info.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Robin Bignall]

Hybrid sleep is really nothing more than the regular sleep mode, and the
regular hibernate mode combined into one. In sleep mode, the PC is
suspended to RAM, while in hibernate it is suspended to disk (either
hard disk or SSD). In Hybrid mode, a copy of the suspension image is put
both on the disk and RAM. It's mainly useful for areas where there are a
lot of power outages, and if a power outage happens while in the middle
of sleep, you can still recover the state from hibernate file.

I've been using hybrid sleep on again off again for many months with my
SSD, doesn't seem to have made any difference to it. Have you been
monitoring its SMART health status before it died? There are many
resident utilities that can warn you of imminent failure of either hard
disks or SSD's. One such utility is called Hard Disk Sentinel, another
is Crystal Disk Info.

Can one choose a different disk for the hyberfile than the system disk?

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Can one choose a different disk for the hyberfile than the system disk?

No, I'm pretty sure it has to be on the boot disk during bootup.

Yousuf Khan

 

[VanguardLH]

Hybrid sleep is really nothing more than the regular sleep mode, and
the regular hibernate mode combined into one. In sleep mode, the PC
is suspended to RAM,

That's just low-power (standby) power mode. What's in system memory
remains in memory by keeping the memory modules powered.

while in hibernate it is suspended to disk (either hard disk or SSD).
In Hybrid mode, a copy of the suspension image is put both on the
disk and RAM.

Nope, it doesn't waste another 4GB of system memory. The processes are
already in system memory. Their images don't get duplicated there
again. The memory image is saved to the disk, not back into memory.

It's mainly useful for areas where there are a lot of power outages,
and if a power outage happens while in the middle of sleep, you can
still recover the state from hibernate file.

I look at it as periodically taking a snapshot of your RAM but not going
beyond low-power mode (not powering down but staying powered and much
quicker to come up). This means your computer is immediately available
as with Standby mode but there's the safety net of the hiberfil.sys
file if there is a power outage. Just added insurance whether you have
lots of power outages or not, like someone tripping over your power
cord for a desktop (or for a laptop if you're using A/C power with dead
batteries). Of course, if you are using a computer whose power source
is unreliable then this is a handy safety net mostly to prevent loss to
changes in the docs you were working on when the outage occurred.

I've been using hybrid sleep on again off again for many months with
my SSD, doesn't seem to have made any difference to it. Have you been
monitoring its SMART health status before it died? There are many
resident utilities that can warn you of imminent failure of either
hard disks or SSD's. One such utility is called Hard Disk Sentinel,
another is Crystal Disk Info.

HD Sentinal: $23-$200 (depends on version: Std, Pro, Enterprise).
Crystal Disk Info: ad-supported (OpenCandy), from Crystal Dew World
(Japanese e-zine), free.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-2.html
See the section titled "Is SMART really smart?"

I've seen lots of users get falsely alarmed by SMART tools along with
seeing drive failures without a peep from the SMART tools. SMART has
been proven unreliable to predict device failure or data loss. At best,
SMART might catch some existing mechanical problems (on the platters)
but does nothing to detect problems in the interface (i.e., the
electronics) and several other mechanical defects. In many cases, the
HDD maker doesn't even enable (provide usable info) for many of the
SMART attributes; i.e., there are many bogus or dead SMART attributes
reported by the HDD for its SMART status.

 

[Jesper Kaas]

From the Tom's Hardware article, an SSD *should* last 18 years
that experiences 10GB/day of writes. So how many writes in GB does your
SSD experience? Maybe you're incurring 100GB of writes per day so the
lifespan is down to just 1.8 years. It's probably not linear but you
get the idea: the more your write, the more reduced is longevity. 4GB
isn't that much unless, of course, you're power cycling the SSD every
minute which thereafter immediately comes back up (i.e., the power mode
bounces) so you'd be writing 5.8TB every day. You never gave a clue as
to the volume of writes to your SSD but then it's likely you didn't
monitor that volume. However, you do know (or can find out) the
interval at which the low-power hybrid sleep will activate. I don't how
you prepare tea. Perhaps you start with cold water and heat over a wood
fire to bring to a boil and then steep the tea for many minutes to make
it strong.

Thanks for the links and the comment. After what I get from that, it
can't be the hybrid sleep that caused the failure. The PC goes to
sleep maybe 5 times a day, which means 20 GB writes per day, and there
will not be much writing on top of that. Anyway, I have turned off
hybrid sleep and leave it there for now. Let's see what happens after
a powerfailure during sleep. Powerfailures are rare here though.

Cooking the teawater over a woooden fire sounds like a nice "slowfood"
idea. I will addapt to that when pensioned. For now it's the electric
kettle that does the job (and I don't put the PC to sleep while
brewing the tea).

I haven't installed any tools to monitor SMART, except SIW, and as far
as I see, SIW only reports if SMART is turned on or off for each
drive.