This article should show you that some things might sound beautiful although they don’t work in reality. But even here we’re learning our share…

Today we’re looking at my Lenovo Thinkpad W500, which should be already known to you from some of my previous posts – especially at the HardDrive Active Protection System (HDAPS). The system should prevent damage by switching of (parking) the disk if the system detects vibrations or shock.

But HDAPS also got a slight drawback: if the system detects shock, accessing the disk is not possible until hdaps made sure, the computer isn’t shaken anymore – which can be quite some time if you’re in a car. Ramdrives or USB sticks are not in danger as they do not have any moving parts..

As I am compiling a lot, it would be quite fine to be able to do this while I am driving my car to buy some time. As moving the portage sandbox into a tmpfs drive shouldn’t be a big deal to get it away from the harddrive.

But the concept itself doesn’t really work as compiling involves a lot of stuff from the disk which isn’t in the sandbox like the compiler itself and a number of libraries. So all those things would have to be preloaded into memory before this works.