turning off harddisk and listen music from ramdisk under Linux

[Martin Wierich <wmartinw30@tiscali.de>]

Hi guys,

I want to use a PC to listen mp3-music. Therefore I have to buy a new
harddisk.
I use Linux and I want to turn off all harddisks while listening,
because
they are so noisy. My plan is to let some homegrown software regularly
copy the music data
from a harddisk to a ramdisk and to turn off the harddisk then. Then I
would
listen from the ramdisk.

My questions:
 - is this possible?
 - how do I turn off a harddisk from software under Linux?
 - do I have to buy a special harddisk?
 - how does linux react on turning off all harddisks? Can
   I cut away any superfluous stuff like CRON and let Linux
   also run on a ramdisk? Or do I need some special embedded
   Linux distribution?
 - or is there a readymade solution?

There are the following circumstances:
 - for religious reasons I only use _old_ hardware (64MB, 100Mhz)
 - I am planning to have a boot partition just for the sole
   purpose of listening to music
 - I want to keep this boot partition small: no X windows stuff,
   no network and so on. The system should start up very
   fast.  
 - I have a SuSE Linux distribution on CD Rom. I only have a 56K
   modem. I don't want to download software for hours.

Any help would be appreciated.

cheers

  Martin