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Old 08-05-09, 08:51 AM   #11
groar
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Thalass View Post
I thought excessive use of swap would kill a spinning hard drive, due to the extra use it gets wears out things and all that. Whereas a SSD has no moving parts, and electrons don't wear out when they're shuffled around a few extra times.

I want to get a 7" EEE PC for my car. A double-din head unit slot in a car is just about the same size as the screen on that little netbook. And a usb touchscreen kit costs about $60. The efficiency of the eee is also important as the car will be an EV.
In fact the problem of flash disk (SSD, USB keys...) is that each memory block can be written a fixed number of times. This is why flash disks are using specific file systems that are trying to keep as low as possible the number of write on each block and that are marking as unusable the blocks that have been written too many times.

To save energy with a spinning disk you can stop it, but if the spinning hard disks have "unlimited" writes, they have limited start-up and are fragile when they receive shocks while spinning.

Denis.

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Earth absorbs 1.8 t CO2/head/yr, while a French generates 6.2 t CO2/yr
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  • kg saved 06/08-08/09: 1816.9+382.9 (ecodriving / 1420mi not driven) = 2199.8
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  • Long life (>100,000 years) : 2.85 g/yr (0.9 mg/kWh)
  • Short life (<300 years) : 31.7 g/yr (10.0 mg/kWh)
Based upon "official" French figures...
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Old 08-05-09, 06:47 PM   #12
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sandcruiser View Post
I've got an old sony laptop w/ a tiny HDD and 512mb ram
I'd like to run it as an entertainment server: mostly music. iTunes won't even install due to lack of processor power and/or RAM.

what about *nix OS w/ ??? for music? I'd like something a little more GUI than not for the music as i'm not the only one using it.
Most desktop stuff under *nix will run fine w/ half a gig of ram. I'm getting away with 128mb, although it uses a ton of swap (half a gig) and can grind to a halt w/o screwing w/ the memory parameters. For music I like mpd, but there are quite a few choices out there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Thalass
I thought excessive use of swap would kill a spinning hard drive, due to the extra use it gets wears out things and all that. Whereas a SSD has no moving parts, and electrons don't wear out when they're shuffled around a few extra times.
Writes seem to be the big limit when looking at SD stuff, so even a newer card can wear out in a couple years if it's always being used for swap on a machine that doesn't have much space for ram. Otoh, I'm not sure how much swap use impacts hard drive life, so I don't have anything to compare to.
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Old 08-06-09, 06:13 AM   #13
insaneintenti0n
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doofus McFancypants View Post
Hey all,

I am aquioring an older computer (PII with Windows NT on it / 17" tube monitor) My goal is to make it into a dedicated MAME machine- Think Oldschool Arcade machine - complete with the joystick controller and buttons)
like this?

(See insaneintention designs then click Arcade)

I used a modded xbox for mine. not sure what it's power consumption is vs. a old computer though.

Though on another note, I just purchased a media center PC to replace my cable DVR when i get rid of cable to just be able to DVR over the air ATSC. I haven't measured the power yet, but I'm not sure I want to know. It's a 350W power supply, but quad core, 8gb ram, 2 harddrives & a blu-ray player.
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Old 08-06-09, 01:30 PM   #14
NiHaoMike
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Have you enabled power management in the kernel and possibly hard drive power management with hdparm?
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Old 08-31-09, 11:27 PM   #15
Spac3dog
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If you wanted to run Windows you could always try nLite.

nLite - Deployment Tool for the bootable Unattended Windows installation

I recently cut over half of the crap out of a windows install with this. I haven't did a reformat yet to test it but that will be coming up soon maybe within the next week. It was a pretty simple to use program.

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