SSD's and System Sleeping

[PerfectGLi]

My saga of SSD's continues. For those of you who don't remember, I had a 120gb OCZ Vertex II SSD fail after about 4 months. I went through the RMA process with OCZ, which was fine and painless until...wait for it...the drive they sent me was dead on arrival.

Unfortunately for me, i derped and waited to install the RMA unit for several months after I got it. Chalk it up to procrastination, business, and general apprehension to install a drive I figured would fail again (I did some research after the first SSD failure.)

My discovery that the replacement drive was dead lead me to an email conversation with a gentleman from OCZ. Long story short, I ended up getting a refund for the VertexII. The support rep offered to replace my drive with a 120gb Vertx III at no cost, but I just couldn't bring myelf to venture into another OCZ drive. They only offered me $160 (I bought the drive for $189.) Since I was so many months out from the end of my previous RMA, I felt it was a reasonable offer. Maybe I'm a pushover. Shrug. Kudos to the OZC RMA support guy. He was helpful, professional, and extremely prompt in responding to my messages. If their drives weren't of questionable integrity, I'd certainly be giving them another look just based on my customer service experience.


Anyhow, I ended up gonig with this for my next SSD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167042. What I wonder about is how a lot of people say that SSD's have trouble when you allow your system to go into a sleep state. I read that a lot when I was researching the reliability of Vertex II's and have seen it mentioned with other SSD brands as well.

Is it best to not allow a system with a solid state drive to enter sleep modes? I'd love for the drive I get from the UPS man today to not be a headache because of things I could have avoided doing to it.

[SpiffyGTI]

Glad to see you stepped up to an Intel drive. They rock. In short, you shouldn't have sleep issues with the Intel SSD.

Here's a good Ars article on it from a while back: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/...th-sleep-mode/

The biggest source of sleep issues seems to be from SSDs that use SandForce controllers, such as Corsair, OWC, OCZ

[PerfectGLi]

The intel drives get 5 egg reviews almost 80% of the time. I don't even know how I bought the OCZ drive. I'm usually the type of person who researches stuff like this. VertexII's have a proven track record of high (15% or so) failure rates and, like you quoted, problems sleeping. I splurged a bit for the extra reliability

I'm glad to hear that the drive I went with shouldn't have the same sleep issues.

Another unrelated question: I understand that there may be some (either BIOS or Windows) settings that I may not have been using last time to optimize system performance with an SSD. I'm on W7. Is there a resource anybody can link so I can make sure I'm getting the most out of my hardware?

[DanG]

I've got an Intel G2 SSD that I had from release date and it's been rock solid. I don't usually computer running and will put it to sleep the rest of the time. I've never had an issue with doing so.

[O_G]

Intel is not perfect by any means. One of their drives did have a significant firmware bug in the past. Also, they stuck it to X-25M G1 buyers by never bothering to update the drive's firmware to support TRIM.

For the price of that 120 GB Intel drive you could have gotten an OCZ Agility 3 240 GB drive and had some money left over.

As for your problems with the OCZ drives... Did you update the firmware? The problems with the drives are firmware-based and should have been resolved. My Vertex 2 has been working flawlessly for months and the first thing I did when I got it was update the firmware.

As for sleep, I put my laptop to sleep all the time. Here are some OS X tweaks:

Disabling sleep mode

Open Terminal.
Type sudo pmset -g | grep hibernatemode. This tells us which mode we are in.
Type sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0. This disables disk writes.
Type sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimageType. This removes the old sleep image.

Disabling hard drive sleep

Open System Preferences.
Click Energy Saver.
Drag the slider to Never.

Disabling the sudden motion sensor

Open Terminal.
Type sudo pmset -a sms 0

enabling TRIM in OS X for non-Apple SSDs:
http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/

disable atime (which writes the last date opened for every file opened -- increasing SSD wear)
http://www.atlanticdynamic.com/optimizing-os-x-for-ssd/

There are also instructions for moving the swap, so if you have a mechanical hard disk you can move it to, that's helpful for increasing SSD lifespan, especially if you don't have a lot of RAM.

[NOTORIOUS VR]

My 120GB Vertex III has been great since the RMA of my original drive (seem to have some sort of hardware issue that would cause BSOD's, wasn't able to update FW on it etc).

They sent me the new one that I am running now and never had an issue since. Also I have to say OCZ customer service was pretty amazing.. no hesitation, quick turn around, friendly people. Would buy again based on my current experiences for sure.

[Crass!]

I'm running a pair of OCZ Vertex IIIs in two different computers. 1 has been installed and running for more than a year, though I did update its firmware. The other has been running in my laptop for 3 months. No issues that weren't resolved with a firmware update & disabling lpm /me knocks on wood.

[Saintor]

My saga of SSD's continues. For those of you who don't remember, I had a 120gb OCZ Vertex II SSD fail after about 4 months. I went through the RMA process with OCZ, which was fine and painless until...wait for it...the drive they sent me was dead on arrival.

I have a Vertex Plus returned on a RMA. I plan to resell the replacement. I lost enough time with it.

[F1_Fan]

What I wonder about is how a lot of people say that SSD's have trouble when you allow your system to go into a sleep state. I read that a lot when I was researching the reliability of Vertex II's and have seen it mentioned with other SSD brands as well.

I have an Intel X-25M G2. I plugged it in, installed the OS and just use it like it's a normal drive. Sleep, hibernate, leave it on for a week at a time, rinse, repeat, whatever... so far after a year everything is fine. I plan to give it no special treatment either going forward from here.