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What about something like this? http://www.memorysuppliers.com/smartdisk-flashpath-smartmedia.html?CAWELAID=327820619

Stick a SD card into a floppy shaped device that your drive can read like it's a real floppy. The drive can still read floppies, and there's no evidence for the warranty people.

That device uses SmartMedia cards not Secure Digital cards.

What about something like this?
http://www.memorysuppliers.com/smartdisk-flashpath-smartmedia.html?CAWELAID=327820619

Stick a SD card into a floppy shaped device that your drive can read like it's a real floppy. The drive can still read floppies, and there's no evidence for the warranty people.

agee with Mr Coward there... laptop drives are not my choice... good power management is.

If all you wanted to know about was how to power down the hard drives, Google would have given you the answer very quickly. Just use hdparm to set the spin down time, it has done a great job of keeping my laptop 100% silent the last 5 minutes.

You seem to have gotten plenty of good answers to this part of your question:

advice on processor/mainboard combos, low power HDDs and a distro with the best power management

Laptop hard drives are low power, and are a good answer to the question you asked. If you want lower power you will be paying a premium, it is as simple as that. I did not do exhaustive research, but a quick google search turned up these links:

Desktop HD specs

Laptop HD specs

Both drives are 7200 RPM. The desktop drive requires 10.6 W for read/write and 1.3 W when sleeping. The laptop drive needs 2 W for read/write and 0.1 W in standby (my math says it needs 10 times more to sleep than standby, I must be reading something wrong). I would imagine a good 4200 RPM laptop drive beats a 5400 RPM desktop drive by a slightly better margin.

The largest laptop hard drive I can find on pricewatch is 120 GB. Four of those would likely require 20% less power when running, and 10 times less power in standby as a single 500 GB desktop drive. I think the biggest advantage in your case is the standby power consumption. You can almost leave a single laptop hard drive running for every desktop hard drive that is asleep.

If I wanted low power and redundancy... I would probably JBOD a bunch of mirrored pairs of laptop drives. Since each pair would be tacked onto the end of the previous pair the odds should be in your favor that only one pair would be on at any given time (assuming you are only working with one video file at a time). If you set your spin down times to a minute or so, it would work pretty well.

120 gig laptop drives are about 200 bucks, 500 GB desktop drives seem to be about 360 bucks. That puts laptop drive only a little more than twice as expensive as desktop drives. In my JBOD setup it is likely that you would average 1/5th the power when running, and less than 1/10th the power at idle if you went with the laptop drives. If you really want to save power that doesn't sound expensive to me.

Here is a question for you. Wouldn't you save a good bit of juice by somehow running DC straight into the PC, instead of going from DC-AC and then back to DC in the power supply? I recall this making a pretty big difference in efficiency when I was thinking about putting a PC in one of my cars. I am entirely ignorant of what you have to work with in a solar powered home, so this may not be at all easy.

I've bought them from http://memorysuppliers.com in the past. They're available. They work. You might not like the price when compared to more mainstream products, but those are the breaks.

"first in a new line of AMD Opteron-based workstations from Sun"

"Up to 16 GB of PC3200 memory (eight DIMM slots, 2GB DIMMs when available)"

Key Applications:

• Defense / Military Intelligence Applications
• Electronic Design Automation (EDA)
• Mechanical Computer-Aided Engineering (MCAE)
• Medical Imaging
• Scientific Research
• Seismic Data Visualization and Interpretation
• Digital Content Creation

How deep are your pockets? 2Gb sticks of ECC are pretty pricey; http://www.memorysuppliers.com/memorysuppliers/kin 2gbpc26re.html/

Here is the system up close at Q Associates; http://www.sun.qassociates.co.uk/workstations-sun- java-w2100z.htm/

Here is a good review of one from AnandTech, they also build a 'white box' they use for comparison and at some $3,000 cheaper than the Sun version which was at over $8,000 at the time of the review; http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=22 55

Sun Java, (n.d.). Sun java w2100z. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from Sun Java W2100z Web site: http://www.sun.qassociates.co.uk/workstations-sun- java-w2100z.htm.

AnandTech, (2004). Sun's w2100z dual opteron workstation. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from http://www.anandtech.com/ Web site: http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=22 55.

MemorySuppliers, (n.d.). Infineon 2gb pc2100 266mhz registered ecc ddr sdram. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from MemorySuppliers.com Web site:http://www.memorysuppliers.com/kin2gbpc26re.h tml.

"first in a new line of AMD Opteron-based workstations from Sun"

"Up to 16 GB of PC3200 memory (eight DIMM slots, 2GB DIMMs when available)"

Key Applications:

• Defense / Military Intelligence Applications
• Electronic Design Automation (EDA)
• Mechanical Computer-Aided Engineering (MCAE)
• Medical Imaging
• Scientific Research
• Seismic Data Visualization and Interpretation
• Digital Content Creation

How deep are your pockets? 2Gb sticks of ECC are pretty pricey; http://www.memorysuppliers.com/memorysuppliers/kin 2gbpc26re.html/

Here is the system up close at Q Associates; http://www.sun.qassociates.co.uk/workstations-sun- java-w2100z.htm/

Here is a good review of one from AnandTech, they also build a 'white box' they use for comparison and at some $3,000 cheaper than the Sun version which was at over $8,000 at the time of the review; http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=22 55

Sun Java, (n.d.). Sun java w2100z. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from Sun Java W2100z Web site: http://www.sun.qassociates.co.uk/workstations-sun- java-w2100z.htm.

AnandTech, (2004). Sun's w2100z dual opteron workstation. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from http://www.anandtech.com/ Web site: http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=22 55.

MemorySuppliers, (n.d.). Infineon 2gb pc2100 266mhz registered ecc ddr sdram. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from MemorySuppliers.com Web site:http://www.memorysuppliers.com/kin2gbpc26re.h tml.

When I RTFA, I noted a related story on the new Compact Flash 4GB Microdrive and found a randomly chosen supplier with more specs and claims that these are in stock now. Just think, a DVD worth of data on a single CF card. Now I can start taking all my digital pictures in RAW format.

Not true. IBM has sold their disk drive business to Hitachi who are promising microdrives up to 4GB this year. They're expecting them to be faster than solid state drives too.4GB for $489 (not yet available), 2.2GB $230 (available now).

You mean like this Floppy Disc Interface for Memory Stick Media

Or like this SanDisk FlashPath SmartMedia Floppy Adaptor