preserve battery life: play video from hdd or flash drive?

[akrako1]

in a situation where you'd like to preserve as much laptop battery life as possible, would it be recommended to play video files off of the Hard Disk or off a flash drive? I'd guess the flash drive, assuming the hard drive powers down due to non-usage, but it does take some power to operate the flash drive as well (light turns on, etc). Simple, non-HD divx/xvid files - nothing that would require high data transfer rates, so the files will play fine from the flash drive. Just wondering about the power usage.

Thanks!

[midders]

A flash drive uses a fraction of the power of an HDD (no moving parts), but it is unlikely that you will be able to get the internal HDD to power down whilst you are watching a video due to pagefile usage, etc. If this is the case then using a flashdrive is an additional power-drain and you'd be better of using the internal HDD. Or better still, get an internal SSD.

Slainte

midders