Crazy Batt life ideas for A8Jm

How much battery life do you think could be gained by replacing the HDD with a CF card? (via CF=>IDE adapter)

Yes I know that wouldn't give you much "hard drive" space but that's not the point of this exercise

 

Hmmm, will windows boot from flash? If its possible, the battery savings should be amazing. The hybrid HD samsung is working on claims to expect an extra 30mins savings on battery life. So I am guessing CF will save much more battery life since its 'all' flash memory and no moving parts. Moving parts is what eats battery from a hard drive.

 

Well, using the adapter, the CF card appears to the system as a regular HDD, so it should be bootable. 4GB CF cards can be had for ~$70 and should provide enough room for Windows and several apps (or a game or two). Especially if you use slimmed down custom builds of Windows. You could then in theory transplant your real notebook HDD into a slim USB casing and keep it on hand.

I'm really not sure how much battery this would save, but I may trying booting ubuntu from CD with the HDD removed to see if I can get an idea.

 

Hmmmm..... now how about a HDD with it's own power supply? It can have it's down very small LiIon battery built in, which charges when on AC. When you work from battery, the HDD uses it's battery until that is depleted, the works as it normally would. No sacrifice in space, and should not be much more expensive than a normal HDD. Now why has no one done anything like this? How about the same thing for a CD drive?

Anyone support this idea?

 

Even if it did work, the read/write speeds wouldnt be that great. Still is a good idea though in theory. I thought I just read an article where all laptop hard drives will be flash memory by 2010. Technology is a great thing

 

Samsung I think has a 76 or something around there in flash memory that will be used for notebooks in the future. Right now just that 76GB chip is like $2k! Flash memory though is faster, will get you much better battery life, and has no moving parts, problems are less likely to happen. As for the CF card... What on earth would you do with only 4GB's of space? It should save on battery life, but I wouldn't think anymore than 30mins or so. Are there 8GB CF cards out?

 

The largest compact flash cards availible are 16GB, but they will cost you about $15,000. 8GB are much less expensive, and you can get one for about about $170 (Newwgg.com, Transcend 8GB 120X).
I would do this is the drive was faster and had a noticible better battery life.

 

Where'd you get that $15,000 number? I heard that Samsung had released an all CF laptop with...I think it was 36 gigs? For something like $3-5000? I think that's what Jason's talkin' about.

Either way, it'd be an interesting thing to try out, what with CF cards so cheap nowadays. Just as an aside, testing with a linux live CD will probably cost more battery life as you'll be spinning that CD continuously.

 

Yeah - wow the CF idea sounds great. The future of HDs are to be Solid State (SSD) which means its a big old flash drive (like samsung's 2K $ 32 gb SSD that debuted recently in Taiwan)

Another crazy battery life saving idea - aside from undervolting, removing fans (VERY RISKY) and getting super-duper batteries?

You could de-power the USB ports. That is really wild, but wouldnt save you much juice in the long run. I hear more RAM adds battery life.

 

If you upgrade RAM it will get you slightly better battery life, because your HD does not have to work as hard, and it takes up a lot more power than RAM does. I think its like 10% better battery life when upgrading from 256 to 512. Now I'm not sure about any other upgrades. I would also assume that having 1 stick of RAM would get you a couple more minutes of battery life.

 

There's a limit to how much more RAM will lessen hard drive seek times though....I feel like about 1 gig is about enough for the majority of us. More than that and it'll just sit idle as the OS isn't able to seek ahead and load future data that far in the future.

 

I tried removing the hard drive last night, but since the only CD bootable OS I have lying around is Ubuntu, I'm not really sure if it helped (Ubuntu apparently does not lower the CPU voltage dynamically the way Windows does, so power consumption is much higher)

The Ubuntu/Gnome battery meter WITH the hard drive in told me 2 hours 5mins with 100% charge

With the hard drive removed, it told me 2 hours with 80% charge *BUT* it had said that ever since 93% charge as well, so I'm not sure if that even means anything. I guess the only way to be sure would be to use up the battery and hand-time how long it lasts with and without the hard drive.

Here's a perfect candidate for the job. I may just order this and try it out with the old 128MB CF card I have lying around. If it fit and booted OK, I could move on to ordering a new, larger CF card

http://www.logicsupply.com/product_info.php?products_id=337

 

Of course you could always get one of these - http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/product_memory.asp?Cid=63

 

Now thats interesting....

If you had your OS and most comonly used program onthe flash drive, you could still have the main HD connected for use of less used files.....and just have it shut off most of the time.

 

Kawasaki: it's a standard 2.5" IDE flash based disk though, not flash card ... how would the main HD still be connected? .. it is very interesting though...

 

External HD?

 

Hey guys, just thinking... if for battery mode I undervolted my CPU (yes I know, the lowest multiplier is limited to 0.95V and undervolting just reduces heat mainly.. but it will help a bit with battery) and underclocked my GPU .... how much extra time will that squeeze out of the battery... ... if I could get an extra 1/2 hour by doing these 2 things, I think it'll be worth it