Fast & low-power-consumption SSD

Hi,

I cannot decide which ssd to order for the new Portege R830 laptop. I am ordering laptop with 9-cell battery and would like to have still a striking fast ssd with as lowest power consumption as possible.

I was thinking about the Intel 520 (120 or 160gb) but the power consumption seems to be at least 5x more than my current 320. How would this affect the battery?

Which one would you recommend? I am planning to have W7.
Are M4 or 830 any better in the consumption?

Thanks!

 

The M4 is not good for battery life regardless. 830 has very low idle consumption (everyday use, browsing, office work, etc), but that spikes quite a bit if you start doing write intensive stuff (photoshop, etc). I'm going back to Intel. They're hard to beat for the price, size, power consumption. In everyday use I don't notice any difference between the 830 and my Intel 310 (msata version of X25-M).

 

Intel mainstream SSDs tend to have the best battery life. Controller also affects battery life, SandForce and Marvell's controller have shown it is not great for power consumption.

 

Samsungs have always been great with power consumption. Their controllers and Intels are pretty good. Intel now uses Marvell (same as the M4).

 

I have no clue where you're getting data for your statements, samsung is just about the same as anyone else in power consumption department.

here are few measurements from storagereview.com:

intel controller

samsung 830

marvell

sandforce 2

everest

apart from everest, all others have similar consumption except sandforce because it's compression tech where it doesn't actually write much to nand.

actually 510 was only drive to use marvell controller and it is not produced any more

 

ivan_cro: thank you for the graphs.
Is there anything similar for the pocessors? (see my other thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/652272-i5-vs-i7-power-consumption.html)

As it seems the 830 would be the best choice as the ssd is most of the time in idle state, right?

The 520 seem to have almost 3x highe power consumption in idle (and a bit lower @work).

 

most of the time ssd sits idle, yes, but it's very hard to make laptop use less than 6W nad in that respect, 0.3W (less than 830 measured) idle or 0.6W(more than ultrax measured) idle (6.3W overall) would be only 5% difference in overall consumption and that's if you somehow managed to make your laptop to spend that little.

Yet, any bump in cpu usage would use more power than idle ssd would in hours.


I have hp g62 for work that uses about 11W at idle with no active apps, and at that rate, 0.3W more or less from ssd is pretty negligible.

also, I have no clue what the consumption of 520 would be (probably somewhere near ultrax), there is 320 in picture i posted.

Plain work power consumption info is somewhat irrelevant, as one has to consider how much work a disk can do with that power, and new drives can do considerably more work per W than old ones

As for cpus, it's much more difficult to compare them than ssds. Ssds are low power parts and as such their power consumption is about the same for all specimens of certain type. All m4 drives consume same amount of power, more or less.
Cpus however, consume very different amounts of power depending on their "quality", if you're lucky to get a good example of 2620m it could possibly consume less power than some bad 2520m even though it has more cache and 300MHz higher nominal frequency. On average if we tested 1000 chips of each, it would consume more, but as they say about statistics, it is a collection of accurate data that gives an incorrect result.
What can be said for sure is as manufacturing process matures, better chips are produced, therefore if you buy 2640m you're sure to get a new chip, and with 2620m you could end up with one produced half a year ago, and just by considering that you could improve your chance to get more efficient cpu.