My laptop does not always correctly wake up from a suspend. I have a thinkpad i sereis 1300 laptop. I tried to use the hdparm on resume and standby parameters in the apm configuration but realized that they are inherently broken. When apmd detects a resume, it tries to run the apmscript. However, this script, along with sh, sed and others are on the sleeping disk!! Of course, nothing in this script can possibly fix anything. The correct solution might be to create a small ramdisk with apmscript and hdparm in it at suspend time. On the other hand, perhaps the kernel can have a flag set to handle these things via proc. I haven't tried any of these things to see if they work, since I suspect a problem with the ide driver and my bios.
The exact same tools are used right before entering suspend, so unless you're VERY low on memory, they're in the kernel's buffer cache. The disk won't be accessed. This has been verified to work on a Gericom 3xC (128 MB RAM) with a very broken disk controller that actually needs -c0 -d0 after a suspend.