A thought about battery life

[paul_hendo]

I was using the iRiver firmware last night looking at some pictures on my H340, when I suddenly noticed that it seemed quiet and smooth when navigating menus. That was because the HDD wasn't spinning up as it does in rockbox to access the data.

Could it be that battery life is worse with rockbox because all the RB info is stored on the HDD not in the firmware, meaning that the drive spins up every time it needs info (eg. menus etc)?

Please shoot me down if what I've said is crap

[Kingnog]

Rockbox has an option to enable caching of the folders and files. This speeds things up because it stores it somewhere (ram?). It should save battery life by lessening hard drive access, not lower it. So no hard drive spin = good for battery! Imagine if the Iriver firmware had this feature, the battery would last longer.

[Membrillo]

But overall battery life is going to always be disadvantaged using rockbox. Correct?

[adama]

Originally Posted by Membrillo

But overall battery life is going to always be disadvantaged using rockbox. Correct?

Hopefully not. I find Rockbox gives a longer battery life (by at least 1 and a half hours) on the H120, so hopefully it'll be better on the H300 too once it's been optimised.

Battery Test (post #11)