In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our question bag, provide our own take, then tap the wisdom of our readers. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.

Q: I've heard that solid-state drives have issues with sleep mode and/or hibernate mode, but I have not been able to find any confirmation of this. Do SSDs have issues with sleep and/or hibernate (or hybrid-sleep) mode? If so, what causes it?

There is little official word on the issues that some solid-state drives have had with waking from sleep over the last couple of years, though we were able to confirm that yes, it is a problem for a certain small subset of solid-state drives. Certain manufacturers are working on solutions, and while there are many suggestions floating around on how to make the blue screens stop, no one of them works for every setup.

The problem is that when certain computers with SSDs are put to sleep, they will hang, cause a blue screen of death, or force a restart when woken up again. This has not been a widespread issue, and appears to happen only for a small (though significant) subset of certain brands. Some manufacturers have noted that the sleep problems seem to result from "compatibility" problems rather than the drives themselves, while other brands of drives appear not to have the problem at all.

(As an informal experiment, we compared search results for terms like "sleep SSD BSOD" connected to the Corsair or OCZ brands to those tied up with another brand like Intel. The Intel search returns virtually nothing relevant, while search results for other brands are filled with forum posts by SSD owners confused about the sleep-induced blue-screens or restarts.)

The biggest source of sleep issues seems to be from SSDs that use SandForce controllers, such as Corsair, OWC, OCZ (who acquired Indilinx, another maker of SSD controllers, though OCZ has yet to do much with them), G.Skill, and a few others. That's not to say the problem is limited to or consistently present with all SandForce-controlled drives. However, some brands like Corsair have openly acknowledged that a nontrivial percentage of their customers have encountered this problem, and they are working to fix it.

We attempted to get in contact with a few different manufacturers of affected SSDs, but received little response. We also contacted SandForce directly, and while the representative we spoke to was willing to put us in touch with someone to explain the issue, he said there weren't any knowledgeable employees immediately available.

We were able to find some official acknowledgement and explanation of the problem online: in a technical support forum for Corsair, one tech support staff member backed a statement last August from a "Corsair product guru" on the sleep problems with their SandForce-using series of SSDs. The post said that Corsair has "received enough drives back to perform some meaningful analysis, and we have, in fact, been able to recreate this failure mode. However, drives that fail on a problem system work fine on other systems. It appears to be some sort of compatibility issue that only appears on a very rare combination of hardware and software."

The Corsair forum post goes on to say that Corsair has been "in close contact with SandForce" about the problem, and that "the scarcity of the problem makes it very elusive and time consuming to resolve." Since that posting, Corsair has released a firmware update for their Force series of drives that relieved many customers of the sleep troubles. But the problem persists on some configurations and the search for solutions is ongoing, as evidenced by forum posts from Corsair's staff as recently as two months ago. So as to what causes the problems, no one is really sure.

We're a little leery of the term "compatibility issue." It is likely that a hardware-software interaction is causing the waking problems, but it could easily be coming from a firmware, driver, or operating system bug (or a combination). An example of a similar situation would be SoundBlaster Live sound cards that seemed to have compatibility issues with Intel chipsets several years ago, a problem that turned out to be a lack of compliance with PCI specifications.

Solutions

If you have one of these sleep-averse configurations, there are a number of proposed solutions floating around that are worth trying. The first step is always to make sure your drivers and firmware are up to date. Both OWC and Corsair released new firmware versions in the last few months that fixed the SSD sleep problems for many users. Some users have also managed to stop the bad SSD behavior by updating the drivers for the Intel chipsets on their motherboards.

Others have found that hibernate modes, rather than plain sleep mode, are the root cause. If you have a desktop, one possible fix is turning off hybrid sleep mode, which does a hibernate-like save of your files to disk as well as the memory when you put the computer to sleep. Many laptops, including MacBooks and MacBook Pros, have had problems not with sleep, but specifically with hibernate mode, which automatically kicks in when the computers are asleep and very low on battery. OWC's newest firmware for their drives is meant to resolve this hibernation problem.

If you are able to set your computer's power states via Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), setting your computer to use S1 as sleep (standby) rather than S3/S4 sleep (suspend activities to RAM/disk) has also been effective for some people.

Since this is an acknowledged issue, many manufacturers using SandForce controllers, including Corsair, are happy to swap out drives that are having sleep problems. Because sleep trouble is a compatibility issue rather than one with the drive itself, we don't know how effective that would ultimately be.

A significant selection of customers, despite all these fixes, still have problems. The computer put together in the recent Ask Ars DIY series packs a Corsair Force series SSD and still sees the occasional BSOD on wake, despite our attempts to implement many of the suggested fixes.

For some manufacturers, the sleep issues appear to be getting a little out of control: OCZ has discouraged customers with their SSD drives from using sleep or hibernate on laptops at all, as a significant number of drives never manage to wake up and are thus bricked.

The reach of the issue still appears small—again, we emphasize that it's produced by a hardware and software interaction, not the drives themselves. There have been no mass recalls, though the problem has been cropping up on forums for close to two years now and still no manufacturer has been able to pin down a solution. It's unfortunate that the waking issues happen with SandForce drives in particular, as their controllers' benchmarks show that they perform very well compared to other controllers that have not exhibited sleep issues, even with random writes and reads as the drive ages.

If you are committed to a SandForce-controlled drive that is producing sleep problems, the difference between startup time and wake-up time is negligible with an SSD, so you may have to work around having to shut down your computer until your manufacturer produces a fix that works for your system. If you're in the market for an SSD, we wouldn't recommend making this issue your primary purchase criteria, but it is worth thinking about—particularly if you can't function without sleep mode.