Crosshair V Formula-Z Another Sleep Issue

[mattg889]

Hi,
I just built my new system around the Crosshair V Forumula-z Mobo a couple weeks ago. And I have been having problems with sleep from the start. I have ruled out the ram and video card. Oddly enough, I think its the hard drives doing it, but the hard drives are good. Here's whats going on:
I have 1 ssd and 2 seagate 2tb disk drives.
I start off by booting my computer up. The disk drives time out after 20 minutes idle. If I put the computer to sleep after the drives have already spun down, it goes to sleep fine. BUT now here is the kicker, when I bring the computer out of sleep I can hear the disk drives spin up, but then after only bout 10 seconds I hear them spin back down. This is both drives, one after the other. NOW if I put my computer to sleep with the drives spun down, it will hang. Screen will go blank, and it will just sit there, unresponsive, and I have to hit reset.
IF I go into each drive, to make them spin back up, before I put it to sleep then it will sleep fine.
Since it is both drives I can assume the problem is not the drives. So is it something in the bios? Is this board incompatible with the drives? Why would it spin the drives back down right after it has started back up?

[Muha_Akhusiyya]

Hi mattg889,
Wellcome to the rog forum!

If you happen to be with BIOS 1602, revert to 1503 and see if the problem persists.

[Praz]

If using a SSD the hard drive option in thew Windows power plan should be set to never because of latent Trim and background GC. Sound as if using the correct setting for the SSD will also fix the issue you are having with the conventional drives.

[mattg889]

I thought windows classified SSD's differently. SSD's are essentially already powered down if your not using them and so the power option shouldn't apply to them, just as de-fragmentation doesn't apply to ssd's.
My old computer had 1 ssd and 3 disk drives and I never had this problem with it, at all, no matter what the power settings were. I want the drives to spin down after awhile to save on their life span as I don't use them at all really, unless I copy files or I play a game, and even then only the drive with the game is in use. And I want to use standby because it saves a surprising amount of money on the electric bill. Setting them to "never" is not a option, and not using standby is Not a option. If it doesn't work then it is broken, and it should be fixed. Just have to find the problem first...

I do have BIOS version 1602. Ok, I will revert it back to 1503 and I will see what happens.

[mattg889]

Well, reverting back to bios 1503 has not changed anything.
And I have done some more testing. I installed 3 differen't hard drives. All disk type (not ssd), and reinstalled windows on one (Windows 7 64bit that is) and it still does the same thing. When I installed windows I only installed the video card (so standby would work), so there was nothing else installed.
I don't know what else to try, could the mobo be faulty? It works perfect in every other aspect.....
Any other ideas?

[mattg889]

Some interesting results. I installed Ubuntu linux on another drive (I was going to anyway) and I have NO problems at all with standby. So it would appear that my mobo is fine, it just has horrible windows drivers. Who would ever have thought that sleep mode would work better in linux than in windows. 🙂
Something I noticed that I didn't notice before. If my hard drives are asleep when I try to put the computer to sleep through Ubuntu it starts the drives back up, checks them quick, then goes to sleep, flawlessly, everytime.
In windows on the other hand, when my drives are asleep and I try to put the computer to sleep, it hangs, and the drives never spin back up. They did spin back up in my old computer...
This really seems like a driver issue to me, or maybe my windows dvd is bad? Well, either way, I hope Asus looks at this thread and does something about it. As long as I have the stanby problems in Windows, I only give this mobo 4 stars.

[Muha_Akhusiyya]

Still your computer's behavior seems odd. Did you try with one HDD at a time? Perhaps its only one of them causing issues?
I have 3 SSDs + 1HDD on my system and no such problems whatsoever. Both in my old Windows 7 installation and in my new Windows 8.1 installation.

[mattg889]

Well, I have been using my setup for the past couple of weeks now and I still don't see any patterns. It is starting to look like it has nothing to do with the disk timeout settings. I did try with just one HDD at a time and that seemed to fix it. SO I switched to my other HDD (Still just one HDD attached) and it still had no problems. So it has issues with 2 or more HDD's? I didn't test it with one drive for very long as I have the drives attached to my documents folder.
This just seems like driver issues. unless I missed something.
I used Ubuntu for a few days and it worked flawlessly. It actually worked a lot better than windows. I might just have to start using Ubuntu full time and just use windows for the games that don't work in Linux.
Anyone have other ideas?

[Myk_SilentShado]

What slots are you using?

[mattg889]

I assume you mean SATA ports?
I have my SSD on port 1, my first HDD on port 2, the second HDD on port 3.
All in AHCI mode in the bios.