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    How to turn off hard drive while watching movies on NC10!

    Discussion in 'Samsung' started by Mark Larson, Dec 18, 2008.

  1. Mark Larson

    Mark Larson Notebook Evangelist

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    If you've ever felt that the hard drive was wasting unnecessary juice while you're watching movies on battery and/or put movies on your flash drive to watch them on your netbook, have I got a solution for you!

    This is with Puppy Linux 4.1 and a Samsung NC10, but it'll likely work with most bootable Linuxes and any netbook.

    Download Puppy Linux or your OS of choice (I hear Ubuntu is a popular Linux OS ;)) and UNetBootIn to install the ISO to your flash drive.

    I used an 8GB flash drive to have sufficient storage space for movies, but the beauty of Puppy is that even a 1GB flash drive will be sufficient (100MB Puppy and a 700MB XviD movie), while you'd need at least a 2GB drive with Ubuntu or other 700MB ISOs.

    Now, restart your computer and boot from the USB flash drive. For Puppy, select the PS/2 mouse, your keyboard and Xvesa video.

    OK, so you probably have Puppy running now. If you look along the bottom of the desktop, the sda x series are your hard drive. Click on Console and type in:

    Code: 
    hdparm -y /dev/sda1
    It should tell you that the drive is going into standby mode. I verified this by holding the netbook while executing the command and felt the vibration stop. Hopefully this means that the hard drive is no longer consuming power.

    If you want to go further, you can type in the following to completely turn it off (note that when I tried this, it didn't seem to do anything):

    Code: 
    hdparm -Y /dev/sda1
    Now just go to your flash drive (should be /dev/sdb1) and click on the movie of your choice. Congratulations, you're watching the movie without unnecessary hard drive action and your lappy is shockproofed!
     
    Mark Larson, Dec 18, 2008
    #1
  2. John Ratsey

    John Ratsey Moderately inquisitive Super Moderator

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    As far as I can see, the NC10 doesn't support booting off the SD card, which sticks out of the computer far less.

    What battery run time are you getting with this approach. In XP I played one DVD that I copied to the HDD and the 105 minute movie dropped the battery down to 68% with the display at half brightness.

    John
     
    John Ratsey, Dec 19, 2008
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