Tony Houghton schrieb:
On Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:32:02 +0000 Gavin Hamill gdh@acentral.co.uk wrote:
On Mon, 2009-03-02 at 19:15 +0000, Tony Houghton wrote:
On Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:30:55 +0200 Rene Hertell linuxtv@hertell.com wrote:
Tony Houghton wrote:
On Mon, 2 Mar 2009 08:50:42 -0800 But I wonder, does writing to the HD really shorten its life significantly compared to constant spinning or frequently being spun up and down?
Yes, i guess it does, cause it writes to the hdd:s surface constantly in large amounts...
But there's no physical contact, the surface just has its magnetic polarity changed (or something like that). Is there a limit to how many times it can survive those changes? Or perhaps the head moving mechanism can wear out?
I thought the driving force for having HDs power down was to reduce power, noise and heat?
Yes, avoiding disc access to keep it spun down is a good idea, but it's difficult to keep one spun down in Linux because of logging activity etc. Even if you manage to solve that problem I think the drive would still need to be used often enough to make it a good idea only if it's something like a laptop drive, designed to be spun up and down more frequently than a desktop one.
Well there are more things in the world then you think ;) - Some people use CF card , some people Microdrives, some Notebookdrives. The video directory is on a couple of harddisks. Thats possible if you layout the directory structure correct with vdr. My machine ist running from a microdrive since more then a year now.
Livebuffer would sure be interesting but not if: 1) it constantly keeps the disks spinning 2) it consumes a fixed amount of memory.
Is there some tmpfs which allocates a certain percentage of given memory ? Would livebuffer be able to cope with that ?
Then i would for sure pick a bit RAM and try it out. Again: Livebuffer might be nice - but not for the price to pay ...
Kind Regards
Steffen