Does anyone use SLEEP on their PC?

Now my PC turns fully on in about 30 seconds, but the SLEEP feature is nice because it leaves all the programs you had open where you left them and turns the PC off.

On Macs it works great, on laptops it works great. On my PC it works but sometimes when I come back from sleep it gives me a BSOD and have to restart.

Also, is sleep bad for SSDs or other parts of the computer?

Cheers

I think sleep is "bad" for SSDs because it adds a relatively large read-write cycle each time you do it. But I use it anyway on my laptop, because I've been convinced by the articles I've read that the life span of modern SSDs is plenty to accommodate such actions.

I have a regular HDD on my desktop, but don't really use sleep on it either

Yeah I think the same. By the time the SSD dies (with sleep or without sleep) I probably would have upgraded to another one beforehand.

I found that sleep mode caused more harm than good and that is why I never use it anymore.

Don't use sleep with SSDs, I had 2 SSDs died after a year or use just because I didn't knew that sleep is harmful for SSDs.

Use sleep if your OS is located on HDD - great feature for those.

Thanks for the tip.

Windows must do something different then. Don't MACs have SSDs and they always are used on sleep mode.

Sleep mode is fine for SSD's if you turn off "hyrbid sleep" I believe. It's some extra feature that causes the large write cycles if I recall correctly.

Windows must give us users an option after installment of OS to not turn on hyperfillsys option too but I don't see that happen.

I don't see sleep mod relevant anymore since waking up time takes as much as boot time using SSD.

Not sure about MACs.

Still have OS on my first 128gb ssd from 2011 also been using sleep full time and it hasn't died on me yet.

I use sleep all the time, rarely turn off my pc fully.

Hibernating your computer writes the contents of your RAM to wherever you set it to (default C drive) and powers your computer off. Hybrid sleep also does this, but it keeps your ram powered up so you can boot up faster. The benefit is that if there is a power outage, you can still read from the drive to resume. Normal sleep just keeps your ram powered up and doesn't write to the SSD.

SSD life time isn't really a concern, even if you hybrid slept your computer everyday and have 32 gigs of ram.

And the reason you are getting a BSOD on resume is probably because of Windows 10's currently unstable state.

I never use sleep on my pc, always hated that feature. along with hibernate and turn hard disk drive off after

who needs sleep when you can boot up in 10 sec?

i just usually turn my screen off, if i need to leave programs open. i never use sleep mode.

I do have hybrid sleep disabled, true

I used it when I had a laptop but never have with my desktop for whatever reason.

i use sleep (as in suspend to ram) on my laptop. i made sure to disable hybrid sleep though as it has an SSD (though the SSD light stays on for a few seconds before the laptop goes to sleep. is that normal if hybrid is disabled?).

its still a lot faster than booting from cold. i just pull the lid up on my laptop and the desktop appears instantly.

I've normally had problems with sleep, either BSOD or no video issues.

I don't use it.

@FelipeInside:

Make sure to turn off hybrid sleep, this way it writes everything to ur ram and not ur ssd\hdd. Sleep is faster than a fresh boot and uses just about the same amount of electricity as if your computer was turned off. If anything its better to use sleep than turnings off ur PC. I set mine to sleep after 10m of idle. If you're having issues with sleep mode there's probably something wrong with ur pc.

@groowagon: it saves you the trouble of even having to do that, just make sure to disabled hybrid sleep and set a time for it to kick in like 10min.

@thehig1: ur PC overclocked?

Same here. Actually longer. Some of my ssd's in my PC date back to mid 2009. I got some old intel 80gb ssds which there are 2 in raid 0, working perfect still. And you'd think raid 0 would be bad for them, in my case, not at all since they run games and don't actually get much writes to them, just reads. And trim works on the intel ssds in the raid since it goes through my motherboards raid chip, so i can run that every so often. I found on a dedicated raid card like Adaptecs for example, the intel trim utility won't be able to run.

I don't have hybrid sleep on though, just regular sleep and I don't see any excessive hard drive activity when i load up from sleep, if anything there is less stress on the ssd because the OS is already loaded instantly.

In the end though, my do clones of my OS drive every couple months, so if it dies i can go back to it, or just reinstall since i have nothing of value on my OS drive for the most part.

If ur running an excessively priced SSD for your OS drive though, don't take my word for it, if you feel safer shutting pc down, go for it. My ssd was less than 200 dollars, i can buy another one if it dies in a few years with no regrets.

But if an ssd is dying that easily from just sleep mode, i think thats a bad ssd. I have another old 80gb intel ssd running on a security computer, which recorded videos 24 hrs a day onto it for over a year, and it still runs... its still running since 2012, but since then i do recording onto a large physical drive so i can hold more security footage, while the 80gb drive is just functioning as the OS drive now.

to turn off hibernation mode, run dos as administrator, and type this:

powercfg /hibernate off

Nah, I never overclock my PCs these days, no need to.

Thanks. I have hibernation off for sure since that does write a lot to the HDD/SSD.

nope i usually just leave my PC running, or shut it off.

Not sure why you guys are worried about SSD wear, look just how much data you have to write to a SSD.

https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

You're looking at around 20,000+ times you can hibernate with 16 gigs of ram.

@zaku101: not right now, it has been but I lost the silicone lottery so my chip doesn't stay stable at 4.4ghz for long.

@thehig1: Try changing the supported sleep state in your bios and see if that fixes it.

How large? Aren't modern SSD capable of writing data equal to it's own size for every day for 10 years now?

never had problems with sleep and ssds

I have an ssd from 2010-11 still at full health and that's with like 15k hours of usage or more and an unbelievable amount of writes.

write speed is trash but reads are still at ~450-500mb/s

Performance degradation also occurs with use. The way I look at it is this way: tick a little box in the OS options so it doesn't pointlessly write to the SSD, OR I can have it pointlessly write to the SSD every time my PC sleeps for the next 5 years and have a marginally slower SSD. Sleep mode works for me regardless if I want it to have it write to the SSD, so I don't see the point in having it write to the SSD at all.

It's in the case of a power outage.

The SSD isn't my only worry.

Does using SLEEP daily also affect things like motherboard? RAM? PSU etc?

No it's not going to wear anything, it just keeps your ram powered up. There is very little power consumption in sleep mode ~5 watts. There is effectively no heat generated to wear out your capacitors. In general, every 10 degrees celsius below their temperature rating(105c generally) doubles their lifetime.

If I'm going to use my computer again within the next hour or two, I'll put it on sleep. Anything more than that, or if I'm going to sleep, I shut it off.

Yeah that's what I normally do too.

I just turn off my monitor, though if I'm gonna be gone for a while, I'll shut it all down

UPDATE: As suggested, I turned OFF Hybrid Sleep and WOW what a difference that makes. The PC used to take about 5-10 seconds to go to sleep before, now it's basically instant because it's not writing to the SSD anymore.

Thanks for the tip guys.

@FelipeInside: I do not because a few months ago I got an SSD. Apparently it is extremely bad to put an SSD to sleep (it is basically the same as the SSD losing power) and that isn't good. (According to my old supervisor, it can create bad sectors).

Yeah none of that is true. I don't know why people in IT pretend to be engineers.

@JigglyWiggly_: Don't know why engineers pretend to be IT. Also, that was just what I was told.

Yeah, sometimes. Usually when I'm going away for a shorter time, a few hours tops. I don't have an SSD so it takes a while to boot. If it's in sleep, it awakes in a few seconds. Haven't noticed any harm while doing this. To never shut it off completely would be harmful, though. I always turn my PC off when I go to bed.

Can't. One of my disks has problems with sleep mode - A Western Digital Red drive.

Same here and I'm still on platter HDD. I'm saving SSDs for my next totally new PC.

I don't use any sleep modes except on my laptops/tablets. PCs run full power, although I'll let the monitors turn off. This applies to my main gaming rig, the laptop that drives my 3D printer (sleep fucks up prints), my arcade cabinet PC, and a few servers in the back room plus a few appliances like the security camera system, the AT&T Microcell, the router, etc. The rest of the "servers" in the house are all VMs anyway (totaling about 15 or so).

This might explain why the utility company is constantly sending me notices that my electricity usage is 50% more than my neighbors. But screw that. I need my 1.21 gigawatts, baby!

-Byshop

I sometimes do on my laptop but not all the time.

I have never done it on my desktop. The programs I need rightaway open really fast anyway, and also open where I left off, so I don't see the use.

I'm no authority, but I've used sleep in this pc for 4 years (with os on an ssd) and never had a problem. But I've also never heard this mentioned.

I used too, not anymore, the moment i turn it on, it crashes after like 10 minutes. It never used to do that.

I think i may have connected the wrong thing to the motherboard or something

I use the sleep mode when I know I'm coming back soon by closing the lid... if I'm gone all day like work then just power off... I had no idea if it gonna cause problems, but by 5 years I'm gonna want a new laptop anyway.

@FelipeInside: I use sleep mode on my PC all the time as I'm on a 1TB + 2TB HDD set up, no SSD. Sleeping is preferable to other options. I can't comment on SSD wear as I've only had SSDs on laptops. The Dell laptop which I sold for a new MBP (128GB since it's better to store everything on the cloud for laptops). We replace laptops more often than we do desktops (unless we're talking about super-expensive gaming laptops...), SSD wear isn't that much of a concern for me. I think the adage regarding using a small SSD for OS and startup while using regular HDDs for storage should be followed.

P.S. holy shit, forgot how buggy and slow Windows is after firing up my gaming PC for the first time in a month.

Yeah I don't really like waiting so I just leave it on sleep.