[LAU] External USB 2 HD for real-time recording

[Len Ovens]

On Sat, March 9, 2013 8:39 am, Peder Hedlund wrote:
> Quoting Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net>:
>
>
>> "All WD external hard drives will spin down (enter into power saver
>> mode) after 10 minutes of drive inactivity. Once the drive is accessed
>> again, the drive will exit from the power saver mode and spin back up.
>
> If it's designed to spin down it's probably also designed to be able
> to handle that.
> An obvious workaround would be having a cron job doing a 'touch
> TempFile' or something similar on the disk once every 5 minutes or so.

Would that actually touch the disk or just the copy of the temp file in
the ram buffers? You are right though that the disk may have it's own
buffer to give time for the disk to spin. It depends if the manufacture
felt the spin up time was an issue. It used to be that a windows system
would stop doing anything else while printing and nobody thought anything
of it. (I haven't had to use windows for some time so I don't know if this
is still the case) Also they may expect the system's lazy writing to make
up for it.

-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net