Substitute Drive

I’m rushing around to get a few things done before leaving, but I glanced at the specs of the drive I installed in my MacBook and noticed something called Reduced-Power-Spinup was enabled by a jumper when I opened the portable case, but I took off the jumper while debugging the issue with the drive.

It ends up that the jumper is enabled for portable USB drives - basically it reduces the power profile for spin-up times so that you don’t need a funky medusa-like USB cable or a separate power adapter.  My first thought was that I would want RPS for better battery life but that is not how this PDF describes it.  In any case if you read it you can decide.

The specs also show how you can turn on Spread-Spectrum-Clocking, which allows you to reduce interference caused by your drive.  Now if only there was a jumper for GSM command channels…