Momentus 5400.3 VS Hybrids VS Hitachi 7K100 powerusage, and is there much time to gain from switching to VISTA?

Clearly the Momentus uses much less wattage both when idle and when active than the 7k100, but how many minutes of difference would this translate to with light usage (wordprocessing/surfing the web)?

I have a Hp NC6400 w/add batt that presently can take 7 hours of such usage with the display dimmed down. How significant would a switch be, and would I gain much from switching to VISTA w/aero disabled?

And what about the new hybrid hardrives, when are they coming, how much impact might they have on batt. life? Upgrade to momentus now or wait for those?

For me raw performance is not that important, although I appreciate like a snappy system. Batt.life and low noise is more so.

 

Which source of information are you using? Tom's Hardware's charts?

In general, the 5400rpm HDDs use less power than 7200rpm. Based on the Tom's Hardware data and assuming that your HDD spends most of its time on idle, you should save about 0.6W. However, to turn this into time we need to know your average power consumption (= battery capacity / run time). If your average power consumption is 12W then 0.6W is 5% and 5% of 7 hours is 21 minutes.

It is too early to be sure about the power savings offered by hybrid drives. This article talks about 20 to 30 minutes in one place and 8 to 10% in another place. If you have already for a HDD with a low idle power consumption then the savings from the drive being off completely may only be around 0.5W, which is around 15 minutes on the example above.

I recently changed the HDD in my Q35 from at Hitachi to Samsung and I think it is giving around 15 minutes run time under light load, plus it is much quieter.

If you have got a relatively power hungry computer then the increase in battery run time will be less.

As for the effect of Vista's eye candy, it definitely keeps the CPU / GPU from sleeping as much as they could. However, how much the get disturbed will depend on what you are doing and how much display redrawing is involved. My best guess is around 10% of your battery run time, plus/minus 5%.

Hope this helps,

John

 

The Seagate (which is amongst the most powersaving sata drives) consumes exactly 0.8w less power with "typical usage" than the 7k100, which with my 104w battery power and 7 hour runtime would give me 7:24 min runtime. With intense usage I get about 3:45 runtime, and would only gain perhaps 10 minutes from switching.

If a hybrid drive cuts power consumption by "50%" we could possible hit approx 0.4w usage improving upon the Seagate with only 0.45w, which equals about 15 minutes more runtime. So the powersaving advantage wouldn't be that big with light use atleast, but I would assume that the performance advantage justifies buying one

Another nice chart:
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/storage/wdscorpio160.html

I was wondering if VISTA with all eyecandy turned off has any powersaving advantage over XP.

 

1. The power differences could be bigger if the HDDs spend more reading / writing. I would prefer to be conservative about the extimated improvement in battery and then be happy to get more.

2. I agree that the Digit-Life table has some good data, but look also at the Tom's Hardware charts to check for consistency and differences.

3. I recently made my Q35 dual boot XP / Vista so I am able to make some comparison of running time. I get the impression that because Vista brings together the power management options into one place then for me the Samsung optimised profile in Vista gives slightly longer running time than XP.

John

 

Hmm, would be interesting to know approx. how many watts you can save from using VISTA, especially with light use. Combined with a hybrid hardrive perhaps I could gain 1 hour runtime?

In any case I think hybrid hardrives will be the thing to get, as I assume they will make things go snappier.