Now with the use of a USB drive, this raises some questions.

Once the system is booted to linux-live on the USB drive, the hard drive should no longer be needed.

I know with Windows systems there is a way to set a power down time for the hard drive(s) after a certain amount of inactive time, just as with a monitor, to save power. Is there such a setting with the PS3 ?

It would be great if this could be done. I did not look into this yet, it just came to mind.

Hi Keith,

I know with Windows systems there is a way to set a power down time for the hard drive(s) after a certain amount of inactive time, just as with a monitor, to save power. Is there such a setting with the PS3 ?

Not that is accessible to Linux, if at all. It\'s possible that the underlying hypervisor has some automatic power management capabilities, however. In any case, any such power saving would only be of the order of a few Watts.

Matt