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>>>>> "nt" == nick thompson <nicholas.thompson1@mchsi.com> writes:

    nt> Do you notice a difference in how long your batteries last
    nt> with the 8gb vs a smaller microdrive?

The thing that sucks about them is, a long time ago in the days of
MS-DOS someone wrote some pretentious-sounding academic paper
convincing everyone that optimal hard disk spindown timeouts were
extremely short, like one minute or less, because of battery life or
something.  Anyone who's actually used a laptop realizes that battery
life be damned---the things you really care about w.r.t. disk spinning
are noise, shock-safety, and access latency.  but anyone who's been
exposed to this awful academic paper has some kind of hypnotic block
installed inside his mind preventing him from realizing this obvious
truth from his own experience.  It's particularly effective on
unimaginative electrical engineers.

The microdrive's timer consequently seems to be 5 or 10 _seconds_...!
Making this even worse, NetBSD has some kind of ``trickle-sync'' deal,
or something, so at least for me something hit the drive about once
every 30 seconds.  It would spin up, spin down, spin up, spin down.
Yes, I know about noatime, didn't help.  I found this hair-clawingly
annoying, much worse than a louder drive, and also sometimes it would
block something mid-keystroke, so thanks to soft-key-repeat I would
get ten 'a's instead of one (or ten backspaces, since I was correcting
things so often), because the software would perceive the key as held
down while the disk was spinning up and balance its accounts by
generating a bunch of autorepeated characters.  I used to get so angry
at that thing I'm amazed I never cracked the screen with the stylus.
I tried, I really tried, thinking if I broke it I wouldn't ever have
to use it again.  god I learned to hate that thing.

anyway I've told this story before so sorry for the spam.  but I would
be very stingy in offering money for a microdrive of any size.

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