Swap placement for most energy efficiency?

[xubcel]

Hello.

Would placing swap at the beginning of the disk before ext3 save power?

Does a Windows dual boot change the answer?

Does the second OS on a partitioned drive use more energy than the first OS?

Are small hard drives more energy efficient than large ones (if the only difference is GB)?

Does adding RAM save power by writing less to the drive?

Thank you.

[Sef]

Would placing swap at the beginning of the disk before ext3 save power?No, it wouldn't.


Does a Windows dual boot change the answer?Depends if Windows is more efficient than GNU/Linux.


Does the second OS on a partitioned drive use more energy than the first OS?No, it doesn't.


Are small hard drives more energy efficient than large ones (if the only difference is GB)?Depends on the design of the drive.


Does adding RAM save power by writing less to the drive?No, You can use ram and not the hard drive - browsing the internet for example.

To save energy:

1) Look for fans, cpus, motherboards, graphic and sound cards that are energy efficient.

2) Turn your computer off when not in use.

[xubcel]

Thank you, Sef.

I read a hard drive review that seemed to say scattered data use more energy, unless I misunderstood.


More power is also required to reach short access times, because the actuator may need to accelerate and decelerate quickly in order to move the heads from one surface location to the next. Again, the number of platters has an influence on actuator power requirements, as one actuator arm is needed to position every two heads (one on each side of each platter).http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/energy-disk-drive,1944-2.html

Your answers seem to say that scattered data do not use more energy, unless I misunderstood.

I would have thought that more head movement across a disk would use more time and power.

Thank you again.

[xubcel]

How is the drive able to access 2kb that are at opposite ends of the drive from each other without using more energy than reading 2 consecutive kb?

Thank you.