MacOS – MBP mid-2012 with SSD, does not hibernate

Specs: 15" MBP mid-2012. Upgraded to Gskill 16GB RAM. Mountain Lion 10.8.2 installed in 128GB Plextor M5 Pro SSD in the optibay.

Problem: My MBP doesn't hibernate anymore. Whether when battery runs out (0%) or when I manually force it to hibernate.

I prefer to hibernate instead of "normal sleep" because I want all my work preserved but have the MBP to power off immediately to conserve battery. I don't mind having to wait for it to resume and I don't mind about the write cycles. I also need hibernate so I can resume when my battery runs out.

Things that I have tried:

1. Run sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25 and pmset sleepnow. This will turn off the MBP's display with the sleep indicator turned on for ~15 seconds. After this, the indicator light will then turn off. But, after ~30 seconds the light will turn back on and start blinking/pulsing as if the MBP went to "normal sleep" mode. When I hit a key, the login screen will appear immediately without showing the gray screen with the progress bar at the bottom like in a typical resume from hibernation.

2. Run sudo pmset -a standbydelay 10 then put MBP to sleep. Mac will sleep (pulsing indicator light) and then after 10 seconds the light will turn off. After ~30 seconds, pulsing light will come back again instead of staying powered off and hibernated.

3. Manually force hibernate using apps like "SmartSleep", "DeepSleep", etc. Still encountered issue.

4. No USB device plugged in, turned off bluetooth, turned off "Wake for network access", unmounted HDD in main bay. Still encountered issue.

5. Deleted /var/vm/sleepimage and let computer generate a new one. Used "Restore Defaults" in Energy Saver. Repaired permissions is Disk Utility. Still encountered issue.

6. Tried putting /var/vm/sleepimage on the other HDD and tried hibernate and resume. The gray screen with progress bar at the bottom appeared but MBP crashed/turned off and went straight to a normal boot.

7. I waited for the battery to drain to 0% and for the MBP to turn off itself. When I connected the adapter and turn the MBP on, it will boot as if it was from a full shutdown. It lost my previous work/machine state.

8. I cloned my SSD to the normal HDD installed in the the main bay using Carbon Copy Cloner and booted from it. Then I forced the MBP to hibernate and it successfully hibernated. The gray screen with a progress bar at the bottom appeared and resumed to my previous desktop.

That means I know for a fact that when I boot my OS X installation from a normal HDD, hibernate is working. I'm running out of things to try. Final straw might be to transfer the SSD to main bay and put the normal HD in the optibay, or to reinstall Mountain Lion (both options I don't want to do).

Anyone else also experiencing this and/or knows how to fix this? Or is hibernate really broken for MBP with SSD? Has anyone with MBPs with SSD tried hibernating and resuming successfully? Can someone else please try and confirm if this is isolated? MBAs and rMBPs are not counted because they have different hardware.

Thanks!