Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 8 Apr 2002 14:31:41 -0400 (EDT) | From | Bill Davidsen <> | Subject | Re: faster boots? |
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On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Richard Gooch wrote:
> 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.
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