Can mobo chipset prevent HDD spin down in suspend mode?

[Wolfi]

I'm experiencing some pretty weird things with my 3 HDDs not spinning down
as they are supposed to do, as soon as my system enters APM suspend mode.

Instead, they continue spinning all night long and only go to sleep, after
the system woke up again and there is no further access to those drives.
Then they do what they are supposed to do, stop spinning after the time
period specified for the HDDs inactivity timer (IT).

But why the heck don't they do that, when everybody expects them to do so,
when the system enters suspend mode as well?

Does anybody have a clue why and/or how this is possible?

According to what I once read, the IT in each HDD is set once at boot time
either by the PC's BIOS or the IDE driver and then the disk is supposed to
manage its spin down behaviour on its own.

Can this be a problem of the mobo's chipset, by somehow doing something
weird with the EIDE bus and thus kind of locking the HDDs?

Does anybody else see this kind of problem with a VIA MVP3 (AMD K6-2+) based
system?

Wolfi

[Tony Hill]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2003 13:10:35 -0600, Wolfi <wolfi@despammed.com> wrote:I'm experiencing some pretty weird things with my 3 HDDs not spinning downas they are supposed to do, as soon as my system enters APM suspend mode.
<snip>Can this be a problem of the mobo's chipset, by somehow doing somethingweird with the EIDE bus and thus kind of locking the HDDs?Does anybody else see this kind of problem with a VIA MVP3 (AMD K6-2+) basedsystem?

I've encountered problems like that on VIA MVP3 based systems, on
Intel 440BX based systems, on SiS based systems, and on damn near
every other system I can think of. The problem is simply that APM
doesn't work right. It's mainly a driver and operating system issue
from what I can tell, though basically every processor and chipset out
there has TONS of errata related to power-saving modes. Basically
it's a real crap-shoot. If you happen to get the right combination of
motherboard, chipset revision, processor revision and driver version,
than it might work. Otherwise something always seems to break, though
finding out just what is breaking where is usually damn near
impossible.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca