On Tue, 30 May 2006, Mark Lord wrote:Not in a suspend/resume capable notebook, though.
I don't know of *any* notebook drives that take longer
than perhaps five seconds to spin-up and accept commands.
Such a slow drive wouldn't really be tolerated by end-users,
which is why they don't exist.
Indeed. In fact, I'd be surprised to see it in a desktop too.
At least at one point, in order to get a M$ hw qualification (whatever it's called - but every single hw manufacturer wants it, because some vendors won't use your hardware if you don't have it), a laptop needed to boot up in less than 30 seconds or something.
And that wasn't the disk spin-up time. That was the time until the Windows desktop was visible.
Desktops could do a bit longer, and I think servers didn't have any time limits, but the point is that selling a disk that takes a long time to start working is actually not that easy.
The market that has accepted slow bootup times is historically the server market (don't ask me why - you'd think that with five-nines uptime guarantees you'd want fast bootup), and so you'll find large SCSI disks in particular with long spin-up times. In the laptop and desktop space I'd be very surprised to see anythign longer than a few seconds.