Sleep or shut down?

With a SSD, is it better to sleep or shutdown, and why?

Thanks

 

I always shut down.
Everything's nice and clean after a fresh boot

 

Just use the computer as you would normally do, i usually shutdown when i need to carry the laptop somewhere, but otherwise, i put it to sleep.

 

Shut down.

Unless I'm carrying it to the next room.

 

I always use sleep, unless i am not going to use it for a few hours, then i shut it down.

John.

 

Instant On during the day (if I am going to use it). Shut Down during the night (or if I'm not using it any time soon).

 

I always disable hibernation as i never use it, also it waste a lot of ssd space.

John.

 

Sleep. I also never use hibernate, as it reserves as much RAM as you have and consumes as much RAM as you have occupied because it basically does a RAM dump to your hard drive / SSD when you hibernate. We all know for the limited SSD space and people sporting 8GB to 16GB RAM these days, that's a huge amount of valuable storage space.

Plus with sleep it's nearly instant on, very little battery is consumed as well.

 

The problem I have with sleep is that it always seems to bugger up something: either the wireless connection, the programs I left running or simply running down the battery much, much faster than it should if it really went to sleep.

Out of the dozens and dozens of times I have tried 'sleep' on each my (then new) systems, one or another problem/issue always comes back to bite me. With SSD's, startup is now so fast that I don't miss the features that sleep offers - especially since it still doesn't work for me and my setups and makes me less productive, uses (effectively) more battery life (by needless rebooting to get things to work) and is embarrassing to experience in front of clients (when it doesn't work 'that time')!

 

I've heard of this SSD feature called garbage collection. Do SSDs do it during sleep and/or power off?

 

On Win 7, you don't need to worry about it. Read this for more info on how Win 7 handles SSDs: Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Some SSD manufacturers also provide utilities to run TRIM to handle garbage collection and if your Sandisk came with that then you could use it. But honestly, I haven't bothered to do any of that with either of the two SSDs in my system and let Win 7 take care of it.

 

Nope. Your laptop has to "idle" for it to work although they never fully indicate what "idle" means. Although I know people have had success if their SSD is showing some performance issues to log out out of Windows and let it sit overnight, reboot and it's running better.

 

No, SSD's can't do anything without power.

They do it during idle periods of the system - most effectively when the machine is powered on but on the 'Log On' screen.

Some SSD's are better than others at this GC; keep in mind that effective GC is a balance/trade off between having the highest performance (always) that the SSD can offer and the Write Amplification factor (WA) that can essentially kill an SSD (fast) if not done right.

See:
AnandTech - Plextor M5S 256GB Review


Read the above link for a good overview of what GC on a modern SSD should look like.

 

^Correct... we close Outlook/etc to go back to a blank desktop. Then logout of the account and it'll go to the fingerprint/logon screen. We can have the screen on or off (but not in the sleep mode). After we come back from lunch, the GC is already done. We don't have to do this everyday but maybe once a week (i pick Wednesdays ha ha). On other days while it's idling it can do some GC too but just pick a day to really let it do it. Also modify/select a power plan that does not let the computer to go into the sleep mode when we want to do the GC....