Vista and HD access

Attempting to squeeze a bit more out of my pathetic small battery in R40plus, I accidentally come across a situation that I am not sure if anyone notices that before.

The conventional wisdom is that in order to save power, it is better to have the HD spindown say after a certain minutes of inactivity. Samsung's plan have it set at 1m.

However, if seems that Vista like to visit the HD from time to time making this supposed to be power saving measure becomes a power wasting measure as spinning up/down draws large amount of energy. By turning this off, I see a consistently lower battery drain according to NHC/Rmclock.

Does this make sense ?

The only disadvantage I can think of is this would shorten the life of the HD but then frequently spinning up and down may be even worse.

 

1. Is the Search and Indexing set to the Power Saver mode?

2. I suspect that there are various bits of software which want to write to a file at intervals. Vista itself is probably one. You can look for files with a date stamp of no more than, say, 10 minutes old. This might give a clue.

I don't think that much power gets consumed to get one of those platters spinning. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that NHC is showing less power consumption if the HDD stops then restarts when needed. If so, that is the way to go. All notebook HDDs have at least a 3 year warranty (Seagate give 5 years).

John

 

but i think it is mean... the auto turning off HDD should be disable to save more power as the turning on/off of the HDD consume more power... as the vista access the HDD most of the time... so the function to turn off the HDD automatically shouldn't be enable...


that's what i understand from what he posted... but if its true... then maybe i will turn off that function too then....

 

Yes, search and indexing is already in power saver mode.

And yes, I see a lower power drain if I disable spin down of the hard disk(i.e., let it spin forever). Of course for an actively using notebook, it may not make any difference but for my usage of web browsing, I see about a 6-10% gain in battery time.