Peter Crowther <peter.crowther at networkinference.com> wrote:
> > From: reic0024 at d.umn.edu [mailto:reic0024 at d.umn.edu] 
> > Heck, on a Newton or iPAQ with the double PCMCIA sleeve,
> > you could get 10 GB of MP3s, using two 5 GB Toshiba PCMCIA drives! :)
> > And on WinCE at least, it  could be done all in Squeak. 
> 
> Aaron, if you're looking at this, check out power management as well.  I get
> about 3 hours MP3 usage, tops, out of my 2G Toshiba drive in the *single*
> iPAQ sleeve (the one with the extra battery) before the sleeve battery runs
> flat.  This is simply because the built-in media player minimises RAM use by
> decoding on the fly - which means the HDD is spinning all the time.  Find
> some way to get round that and you have an instant convert :-).

Indeed, that sounds pretty crummy.  Not sure how much it'd increase
battery useage, but it'd be interesting in caching in memory, loading as
many as mp3s as we can into RAM.  Easily made modification to SqueakAMP.
:) When you stop reading the drive, does it continue to spin for some
amount of time?  If so, I wonder if there's some way to turn it off,
like using hdparm in Linux.

Aaron