Accuracy of Hard Drive Power Ratings?

Hey folks, I was just wondering if anyone has any idea as to how accurate hard drive power ratings are.

I bought a used tablet PC and swapped the stock Hitachi 5K100 drive with a Fujitsu MHV2080AH in an attempt to squeeze the battery. The Hitachi is rated at 0.9 watts idle and the Fujitsu is rated at 0.6 watts idle. Transfer power consumption is about the same 2 watts for both drives.

The Fujitsu drive definitely runs cooler than the Hitachi (probably by a good 5 degrees) but it's louder too. That being said, I'm definitely getting less battery life out of the Fujitsu than the Hitachi under the same usage patterns. I agree it could be the second hand battery dying a quick death, but I started with almost four hours on this thing.

So yeah, hard drive power specs. Accurate? Somewhat accurate? Complete lie?

 

I've always assumed that the power measurements by Tom's Hardware were based on actual measurements and not manufacturer's specs.

If the Fijitsu runs cooler then that should be a good indicator of it using less power since most of the energy becomes heat (or are you suggesting that the Fujitsu converts the electricity to noise?).

The only reliable test would be to monitor the power drain from battery under the same operating conditions for each of the HDDs.

John

 

I dont think that the hdd will change the battery use a noticeable amount even if those figures are accurate, its only a very small part of what uses up the battery. You would get more impact but tweaking HDD use probably by doing things like eliminating a page file when possible, keeping it defragmented, optimize your boot file sequence ect.

If your willing to swap a HDD just for battery reasons, your the type of person that should look into SDD more.

http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/sandisk-32gb-solid-state-sdd-hard-disk

It has a huge difference in power draw, also its faster, longer life, and creates almost no heat.

 

The harddrive power usage listed on the drive is complete bs.
If you have seen any seagate harddrive, it will always have a power draw, of half of the competition. Seagate labels their drives with minimum power usage, not the maximum power usage as other manufacturers post.

I would refer to the toms hardware charts for power consumption, since you cant believe whats labeled on the sticker.

K-TRON

 

So the Tom's Hardware charts are based on actual measurements and not the sticker number? The few drives I looked up specs for had similar sticker ratings to Tom's figures, so I assumed that they just used those sticker figures.

Good to hear those are real measurements; I'll see if I can fins some similar drives to compare. Thanks for the replies.

If I had the money to burn on an SSD I wouldn't be buying a used laptop now, would I

 

Perhaps you should by an expresscard ssd. I bought an expresscard (the fastest one you can currently buy) from futurestorage.co.uk . Now I run ubuntu off of it. It has similar read/write ratings to a normal hard drive, however brilliant access time, power consumption, low heat emissions etc. You can run ubuntu from it without any tweaks, however remember to use ext2 to minimize writes to ssd. I find it troublesome to boot xp off of it ( u have to modify your setup disk).