>  >I have noticed that my 2400/400/80's upgraded 10G hard drive seems to do a
>>thermal recalibration every thirty seconds or so (at least I think that's
>>what it's doing). It makes recording/playing audio impossible without putting
>>in a glitch whenever this happens. Can someone comment on this, and tell me
>>if I just have to live with it, or if it is something I can change, or if
>>there's a workaround? It may be one more rusty nail in the 2400's coffin on
>  >the bumpy road to iBook/Ti-book land (mixing metaphors, I know).

It's been a while since thermal recalibration has been an issue with 
drives. What you're noting is probably the ATA powersaving timeout, 
which is parking the heads after a certain length of time. It's a 
feature of all IBM drives since about the first 10GB models, and also 
some other manufacturers (part of the ATA-4 standard). It's only 
supposed to happen when the drive is idle for a certain length of 
time, but the default timeout is very short so you may be seeing it 
here (especially if the audio buffer in RAM is large - if possible 
you might try making it smaller to keep the drive busy as a possible 
workaround).

There's a Mac app around that can adjust or disable the timeout, 
though I'm afraid I can't remember the name of it, and my own 2400 is 
dead and disassembled so I can't look at it to check. It needs to be 
run after each restart or wakeup, which isn't all that convenenient - 
unfortunately the ATA standard is pretty dumb, and there's no way to 
save the setting permanently (IBM drives apparently have a 
proprietary way of adjusting the default setting but there's no way 
to set it manually, even on other OS platforms).

You'll find that the drive in any new notebook will have the same 
feature, though it may be less noticeable.

-- 
Marc Sira       |       [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If you can't play with words, what good are they?

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