abit.care@HEXUS
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Okay, not sure whether this is an "Abit problem", and "Intel problem" or a "Microsoft/WinXP problem", or even a combination of one or more of the above, so thought I'd post my own observations and hope that if you all do, it'll prove easier to pin down the culprit.
Anyway. The problem I'm on about is the way the system behaves when set to go to hibernation (S4). What you'd expect to happen is that the GUI shuts down, the hiberfile gets written to C:\, the hard disks power down and the system shuts off, simple. But, that's not how it works...
After the GUI shuts, all the hard disks connected to the ICH8R spin down. Then, as the hiberfile progress page is shown, all the disks, one by one, spin straight back up again. As soon as they're all back up and initialised, the hiberfile gets written and, yet again, the disks sequentially spin down and the system powers off.
This process takes quite a while if you have all six ports populated, and it also subjects the drives to at least one unnecessary power cycle sequence. Given that power-up is the most stressful part of a disk's life, this is a little more than just a time-consuming annoyance in the longer term.
As that the boot disk (or array) is the only drive needed to write the hiberfile, why do all the drives get spun back up, or why, come to think of it, aren't thy all just kept spinning until the file has been written and it is time to finally shut them all down?
I am guessing at this point that the blame for this lies somewhere between Intel (who wrote the ICHxR drivers and BIOS, as well as the chipset drivers, and a large part of the power management specs) and Microsoft, who wrote the OS.
However this is only a guess, and it's perfectly possible that Abit may have a hand in it. As such, if you are running XP or Vista, and have a system with an Intel ICH7R or ICH8R controller with more than one hard disk plugged into it, can you post some details of how it behaves when going into hibernation? Thanks muchly!
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Does seem a bit weird, its like detection when AHCI is enabled, if I boot from off it takes about 10 seconds for the AHCI bios to find all 5 drives, however if I tell the PC to reboot it takes for ever, when it gets to detection it seems to allow the drives to spindown, then spin backup then detect, bloody annoying
