You are not logged in.

#1 2009-07-28 03:57:53

drostin77
Member
Registered: 2009-07-15
Posts: 45

Suspend to disk (hibernate) to sd card... Bad idea?

Simple question, maybe not a simple answer.

I use pm-suspend right now, battery slowly drains away while my computer is suspended.  I'm thinking of using pm-hibernate when i know down time will be > a few hours, but it seems slow and battery-intensive to suspend to a spinning disk (which I have).  However my laptop (eee 1000he) has an SD card reader, and I was thinking (without a lot of basis for this thought) "wouldn't it be neat if I could suspend to an sd card instead, I bet that would use less power and be faster, but my computer still wouldnt need to provide power to the card to keep my data alive."  So my question:

A) Would suspending-to-disk (hibernating) to an SD card be faster than to a spinning disk, assuming the card is in an internal card reader (which is probably just a usb card reader stuck in the chassis)?

B) Would suspending-to-disk (hibernating) to an SD card be more power efficient than suspending-to-ram (or suspending to a spinning disk) (I don't mind if I need to figure out how to turn off/turn on the card reader as part of the wake/suspend scripts)?  This question might be too vague, in which case, for approximately how many hours of downtime would it be better to suspend to an sd-card than it to suspend to ram? (i.e., lid is closed 30 seconds ram is almost certainly better, but lid is closed 1 week, sd card is almost certainly better.  Where exactly the sd card becomes better is my concern).

C) Would suspending-to-disk (hibernating) to an SD card be possible?

I know that the right way to do things here (and maybe anywhere), is to try something out, then report results or problems, but I don't own the SD-card yet and I didnt wanna waste money if the whole endeavor was pointless:P

P.S.  To all you friendly arch users who have helped my recent questions (3 or 4) thanks so much and sorry I'm only asking and not answering yet, once I have some faint clue what is going on w/ arch I promise I'll give back ;p

Offline

#2 2009-07-28 06:22:26

uwinkelvos
Member
Registered: 2009-06-07
Posts: 129

Re: Suspend to disk (hibernate) to sd card... Bad idea?

A) I don't think so. The best write speed you could hope for with an sd-card would be 15 MB/s, your spinnig drive should be at least 2x faster.
B) It should be more power efficient. To know exactly how much gain this would be, you need to take into accout the following things: which drive hosts your primary swap partition, how much energy does your spinnig disk/sd-card need to write and read ~500 MB.
C) I think it would be possible, but i don't think it will be worth the effort. Imho you could consider buying an good SSD drive. This would be a real energy saver, but not that cheap yet.

Offline

#3 2009-07-28 07:25:52

drostin77
Member
Registered: 2009-07-15
Posts: 45

Re: Suspend to disk (hibernate) to sd card... Bad idea?

Thanks for the info, sounds not worth the bother.

Ya, SSD is ideal, but for now they are just too expensive, especially since I can't part with 50+ gigs of music:P

Guess I'll just wait it out, mb by the time its time to upgrade my netbook to a zippy little 32 nm with graphics on the same chip I'll get a 500 GB SSD and 24 hours of battery life, built in 3g er... its good to dream, right?

Offline

#4 2009-07-28 12:37:03

uwinkelvos
Member
Registered: 2009-06-07
Posts: 129

Re: Suspend to disk (hibernate) to sd card... Bad idea?

you'll remember to get me one of those too, will you? smile

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB