System hangs resuming from S3 standby - Problem Identified

[ubiquityman]

I recently built a Bad Axe 2 system with a QX6700, 2GB of ECC RAM.
Everything seemed very stable, however, while the system would enter S3 suspend mode properly, it would not RESUME or wake up from suspend properly. Sometimes applications would not start, sometimes applications that were running would not work properly. Other times, the screens/monitors would be black and not power up out of power saving mode.

After digging around a bit, I found that my Samsung SH-S183L SATA DVD Writer was the culprit. It was on sale a couple months ago from Newegg and they probably sold truckloads of these.

As you can see in the attached screenshot, the Power State Mappings for this drive is "S3 -> Unspecified", and also unspecified for all the other power saving modes. When I disabled this device in Device Manger, then S3 Suspend works perfectly.

Seems really stupid of Samsung to not support power saving modes. There may be environmentally friendly reasons for power saving, but the practical aspect of it is my Quadcore system probably draws >200W idle, so the $ savings here for S3 standby is quite significant.

I tried updating the firmware on the DVD, even though I had the latest version, I reflashed it, but as expected that didn't make any difference.

Has anyone else had this problem? Are there any known workarounds?

Power Modes screenshot

 

[PurdueRy]

Do you have SATA in AHCI mode in BIOS and have you updated your drives formware to the latest version? (SB01 I believe)

 

[ubiquityman]

The SATA does not have an option of AHCI mode because the DVD drive is connected to one of the 4 Marvell SATA ports.
I did suspect perhaps it was an incompatibility with the Marvel chipset.
Since I can't connect to the Intel SATA ports (because I'm running 4 drives on that with Matrix RAID 10, and RAID5), I also tried installing an Addonics PCI SATA controller (SiliconImage chipset), but that produced the exact same results as the Marvell chipset, so that give me additional confidence that it's not an issue with the SATA chipset.

As for the firmware, yes, the drive does have version SB01. And for good measure, I did reflash the drive with the same firmware version when connected to the Addonics PCI SATA card, but again, with the drive on, it failed to resume 100%.

The easiest test for me to test whether suspend works is to exit FireFox before I suspend, and then start it up after I resume.
(If Firefox is open when the computer is suspended, it still works after resume. It must be fully exited before suspend to test this problem.)
When the computer is resuming properly, Firefox will run and get on the net.
When the computer is not resuming properly, Firefox shows up in Task Manager, but it doesn't open up any windows and is not visible.

 

[ubiquityman]

I tried the DVD ROM drive on a different machine with onboard Intel SATA and the S3->D3 power saving mode mapping does appear.

Then I attached a HD to the Marvell SATA port on the Intel Bad Axe 2 mobo and it also now shows up as S3->Unspecified.

So it appears as though the Marvell chipset does not support power saving properly.

Can anyone out there that has an Intel Bad Axe 2 motherboard & SATA devices connected to the Marvell SATA ports confirm if theirs does the same thing?