Any thoughts about this battery question..

[alarson82]

I have an ASUS EEE PC 1005, and will be taking it on a trip and am planning on using it to let the kids watch movies on it. How much battery life would it save if instead of backing up movies to the hard drive, I put them on a flash drive? (movies we already own, but since the netbook doesn't have a dvd drive I will need to rip them)

 

[grohl]

invest in a power inverter and it wont matter

 

[alarson82]

invest in a power inverter and it wont matter

We are flying from Minnesota to Florida so in airports and on plane I don't think Ii'll have access to a plugin.

 

[techs]

I would think it would use more battery power to use the flash drive.
The hard drive won't power down while you're playing a movie, and I would guess it would cost more energy to draw the data off the flash drive than an already running hard drive.
Especially if the software uses read ahead caching and stores it on the hard drive.
That's just my guess.

 

[grohl]

my bad, assumed car trip

 

[alarson82]

I would think it would use more battery power to use the flash drive.
The hard drive won't power down while you're playing a movie, and I would guess it would cost more energy to draw the data off the flash drive than an already running hard drive.
Especially if the software uses read ahead caching and stores it on the hard drive.
That's just my guess.

Thanks for the insight. If SSD drives were cheaper I'd replace the existing hdd with one of those, that would increase speed and use less power.

 

[lxskllr]

Thanks for the insight. If SSD drives were cheaper I'd replace the existing hdd with one of those, that would increase speed and use less power.

If I were trying to save every bit of power I could, I'd remove the HD, then install Linux to an SD card, and boot off of that. Disable everything you don't need in BIOS, then play the movies off a flash drive.