tweaking ide and hdparm settings

greetings all,

i was wondering if we all could share our thoughts on tweaking the ide
and hdparm settings to get maximal battery life out of a udrive.

in particular i would like to have a ~10MB read ahead cache so entire mp3s
can be loaded at a time. this would seemingly have a huge effect on
battery life for those of us who listen to lots of mp3s.

also i recently went back to familiar for the sole reason that my run time
with intimate was not even a day of use. i think this could likely be
remedied with the proper tweaks.

so, whats the best way to do this?

TiM