Source points to Haswell Z87 USB bug
Intel's Z87 chipset, designed for its next-generation Haswell processors, may have a bug in its USB 3.0 controller, a source has claimed.
According to an anonymous source with access to Z87 hardware speaking to Australian technology site PC & Tech Authority, the initial C1 stepping of the chipset has a bug in its USB 3.0 controller that causes some models of external hard drive or flash drive to enter a standby mode from which it can't be programmatically woken.
The flaw, the site's source claims, triggers when the computer enters the S3 sleep mode - a suspend-to-RAM state in which the computer draws very little power while retaining all running applications and data. As expected, all connected storage devices enter a sleep state when the computer is in S3 - but not all of them wake up again when the computer returns to a running state. Due to the bug, it is claimed, some drives will remain disconnected until they are physically removed from their USB port and plugged back in - a process which will dismount and then re-mount the drive, potentially losing any files which were open at the time the computer entered sleep mode.
It's not a serious flaw, to be sure, and a far cry from the design issue in Intel's Sandy Bridge SATA chipsets that led to multiple manufacturers halting shipments of affected motherboards until the issue could be resolved with a new stepping. It's also unlikely to halt Intel's scheduled roadmap for the Haswell launch: as such a minor issue, and affecting as it does only selected external storage devices, it's likely Intel will ship the parts to its customers anyway while working to resolve the problem with a C2 stepping as quickly as possible.
That is, if the flaw exists at all: Intel, as is usual, has refused to comment on the matter, rebuffing the site's request for clarification with a brusque statement that it 'won't comment on NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) technical work we are doing,' while stating that it is fully on-track for launching Haswell and its supporting motherboards.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyIndeed. If this is indeed true, I suspect Intel may move only the C2 (or newer revisions) to final manufacturing...
Possible flaw with unreleased tech. Not sure what there is to take from that really. Anonymous rumours, about as reliable as astrology.
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This has been able to happen with Windows Sleep mode for a few years now - across the last 3 generations of chipset!! I recall first encountering this on X58 chipset but it was a bug before this as well. It's more likely to be a software bug rather than hardware related. Something Microsoft should have fixed years ago.
It's specifically related to USB Suspend (a windows feature) and the ability for hard drives to enter standby mode (another windows feature).
The fix is obviously to disable sleep, usb suspend and the hard drive time out in the Power Config. However, turning off the hard drive suspend & sleep mode feature in the Registry is preferred.
I get your point, and I was wrong to refer to them as "Windows Features", and I'm not aware that this has ever been broken in Linux.
It's the Windows Implementation that's broken, that was what I meant.
I suppose this would be bad news for linux users. But my original point was that this feature hasn't worked in Windows for the best part of the last 5 years and possibly longer. It's not something I've ever used and not something I will ever plan to use until it works consistently within my main OS.
My experience in this comes from working for a systems integrator and having seen thousands of systems come back to us with issues relating to this (it can even cause BSOD's). Needless to say that we have disabled those features by default to prevent further problems. As far as we are concerned the problem is fixed :)