Patent ID: 7702940

Claim:
A method for adaptively minimizing the total power consumption of an apparatus comprising a subsystem comprising a mass storage device and a buffer memory, said method comprising the steps of: determining an optimum buffer size for which the power consumption of said subsystem is a minimum for a given streaming bit-rate to/from said buffer memory; and adjusting the buffer size of said buffer memory to said optimum buffer size, such that the power consumption of said subsystem is minimal, wherein the storage device is a hard disk drive and the step of determining an optimum buffer size comprises: determining a hard disk drive data rate of the hard disk drive; determining the stream bit-rate to/from the buffer memory; and determining the optimum buffer size having the lowest power consumption at the determined stream bit-rate, and wherein said optimum buffer size determination step comprises calculating optimum buffer size from a formula, looking up optimum buffer size in a look-up table, or measuring the minimum power consumption of the subsystem in a feedback loop controlling buffer size.