> Bill Davidsen writes:
> > On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, Richard Gooch wrote:
> >
> >
> > > But I *want* to write while the drive is spun down. And leave it spun
> > > down until the system is RAM starved (or some threshold is reached).
> >
> > The threshold I hit is how much think time I want to risk. I have
> > no problem spinning down the drive after inactivity, but the idea of
> > investing several hours making little changes in a program or
> > proposal document and then maybe losing them... batteries are just
> > not that expensive.
>
> It's not $$$ I'm concerned about. It's mass.
The "I" in my posting referred to my personal preference which is safety
over what to me is a minor inconvenience.
After looking at disk accesses for a while I *think* diddling bdflush
parameters will prevent disk writes for quite a while if you don't do
reads of uncached data. So far I'm just catting /proc/partitions once a
minute and doing a diff to the previous. looks like a write every ten
minutes or so, what I set in bdflush, probably of syslog mumbling, since
the system is relatively quiescent at the moment.
Does anyone have a thought on power consumption of flash chips? I have a
20MB compact flash I use as an auxilary backup for critical stuff, "just
in case" and I bet I could put enough on a 64MB to keep the hard drive
spun down for hours, if I were interested in doing so.
-- bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> CTO, TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/