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ok lets see if I can explain it (the way I understand it) (BTW SEE POST ON MICRODRIVE BATTERY USAGE)
a microdrive doesn't really draw power unless its contents are accessed. That is if you are playing solitaire, not getting any data from your drive, the drive stays inert and takes no power (this is unlike your computer hard drive which is nearly always spinning, think of an iPod) ok so now say you need some data from the card, the electric motor has to bring the disk up to speed and THEN the needle can finally find the correct location and read the data.
When playing large video files. Beta player is used to pulling the data directly off the media. SO if you are playing on an SD card, it will buffer a bit and just keep drawing data constantly from the SD card as it takes no more power than from ram.
HOWEVER
if you are running betaplayer with a microdrive. EVERY SECOND that drive is running is taking lots of power. And since the drive can transfer data much faster than you can watch it. what beta player does is turn on the drive for a couple seconds and load a few minutes of video to memory as a "buffer".
Your video will keep running but your microdrive will be off until you get to say 10% (whatever percent you set) and the microdrive will start spinning again to fill your buffer.
For best battery life I would recommend a fairly large buffer and low restart.
hope this helped.
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