Remove the hard disk for longer battery life?

Hi,
i have a question. Is it possible to remove the hard drive of the AAO150 and boot the hole system over a USB Stick or SDHC memory card for a longer battery life ?

My idea was, to remove the harddisk. A build in USB stick contains a GRUB bootloader, which allows to boot a Linux or Windows System from a SDHC card. My oppinion is, that a hard drive consumes more electricity than a card reader with a memory card. Can anyone confirm it?

The reason is, i need my netbook every day for my study. All my scripts are in pdf´s. I also need a office solution,a few electrician programs and internet . :mrgreen:

Ok. I have a 9 cell battery, but sometimes 7 hours are not enough

 

Booting off SDHC card is not going to happen anytime soon; the BIOS does not have drivers built in for the JMicron SDHC adapter.

Booting Linux off USB is certainly feasible and with a bit of ingenuity you could possibly configure a Linux kernel with the JMicron drivers compiled in that boots the kernel off a tiny USB stick and then mounts the rest of the Linux system off the SDHC. You might be able to put the HDD to sleep with hdparm.

My 8GB Class 6 SDHC card reads and writes at around 20MB/s according to HDTune. If you can find a USB stick with similar performance then the SDHC card could be irrelevant.

If you want to boot XP then alternatives that might work for you are:

1. A decent internal SSD
2. A second 6 or 9 cell battery
3. Find somewhere to study with a domestic electricity supply and use the PSU.

 

I think i will give it a try. ;-)

 

The Jmicron drivers work with (at least some) 2.6.23 kernels, but not with 2.6.27 kernels. They compile against 2.6.27 kernels, but don't work. On the other hand, if you just want to read SDHC cards, the drivers you need are available (mmc_core, mmc_block, and sdhci come to mind). You'll just need to compile them into your kernel; normally they're compiled as modules. Good luck!