From: Mike Holden <rockbox_at_mikeholden.uklinux.net>
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 09:31:22 +0100 (BST)

LoveLearn said:
> But CONTINUOUSLY running
> the hard drive plus the electronics sections requires more average power
> than the connected power supply can input.

Correct so far!

> Continuous or nearly
> continuous hard drive running can occur when transferring files or when
> recording. Right??

Wrong. Surely recording doesn't spin up the disk any more than reading a
file during playback. The file size will be the same during recording it
as it will be during playing the same file back. Assuming the disk
spindown works the same during recording as it does during playback, then
it should be the same spinup/spindown times.

This is of course making the big assumption that recording is buffered
into a memory block the same size as playback is, and that writes occur
when the buffer fills over the same threshold as used when playing back
music.

Without looking at the code, and watching a unit during recording I cannot
say whether these assumptions are reasonable though!

-- 
Mike Holden
Rockbox page: http://www.mikeholden.org/~rockbox

Received on 2003-10-08