HDD Spindown & SDHC Ubuntu root to conserve battery

Hi,

I just ordered the 160 GB HDD/6 cell/Windows XP version of the Aspire One and should receive it sometime next week. I wasn't too excited about having to pay the Microsoft tax, but unfortunately Acer doesn't seem to sell this model with Linpus instead :cry:

My plan is to run Ubuntu from an SDHC card in one of the slots. Unfortunately it appears as if the AO doesn't support booting directly from either one of the slots, thus I'll look into setting up Grub as a boot loader on the hard disk and then boot into Ubuntu from the SDHC card (my previos EEE 701 had no issue booting from an SDHC card...).

Now once I've got this up & running I'd like to spin down the hard disk to conserve energy, keep the machine cool and extend battery life. Only if I need to access any data on the disk would I spin it up again, mount it and access files.

Having heard about hibernate/suspend problems with SDHC cards in the current Ubuntu setup instructions I'm expecting to shutdown the machine fully when not in use, until that issue has been resolved.

Has anybody done this and is this feasible?

cheers,

Heiko