Arch Linux

ccchris

Member

Registered: 2006-09-25

Posts: 16

Way to reset hd after suspend? (Sandforce SSD issue)

So I bought myself a netbook and replaced the hdd with a new Corsair F60 SSD drive to fulfill my old dream of having a laptop without any moving parts.

Installed Arch and most hardware functions work, so far so good. However despite having done some research before buying I totaly missed the quite critical bug in my new SSD drive wich means that the drive dies (or becomes unresponsive) after a suspend to ram. This issue is known and Corsair say they are working on a firmware update (but they have done so for a uncomfortably long time), so I started to wonder if I could fix it myself somehow.

The reason I think it might be possible to solve (even if my experience in low level hardware functions is very limited) is because of how my system behaves after a suspend2ram.

After the wakeup I get put back into my WM (i3) with full control. I can type whatever I want in a terminal window but of course no binaries (ls, cat, etc.) are found. All i have available is commands the kernel supply (for example typing "dirs" gives "/" as output). Somehow this gives me hope there is a way to reinitialise, reset or "restart" the HDD without doing a hard-reboot (which by the way solves the problem, everything boots fine).

So, I was hoping anyone with a little bit of more insight could tell me if there is any chance of succeeding with this or of I should just give in, avoid using suspend and wait for a firmware update for my drive?

Thanks for any input.

xvello

Member

Registered: 2010-05-15

Posts: 81

Website

Re: Way to reset hd after suspend? (Sandforce SSD issue)

Hello

You should investigate hdparm, which allows to do a lot of black magic on ATA busses and drives. You might want to copy the binary to a tmpfs to have it after resuming from sleep.

`hdparm -C /dev/sda` will tell you which state the drive is. If the command fails, then you might need to restart the ATA bus.

zblach

Member

Registered: 2008-10-07

Posts: 23

Re: Way to reset hd after suspend? (Sandforce SSD issue)

Hey guys,

Same issue here, but moving hdparm into a tmpfs doesn't solve this issue, as the device '/dev/sda' doesn't exist upon resume. How does one manually restart the ATA bus?

zblach

Member

Registered: 2008-10-07

Posts: 23

Re: Way to reset hd after suspend? (Sandforce SSD issue)

okay, further investigation with the hdparm utility reveals that this device is supposed to support power management, but does not accept any modifications (i.e. disabling) of the low power states.

looks like we might be stuck until sandforce (ever?) releases an updated firmware package.