Power Cycle SSD in Laptop for longer battery life?

I have a few questions regarding power cycling an SSD:

Is it bad to constantly power cycle an SSD?
How many power cycles can it endure?
How long does it take for an SSD to "power on"?

Basically asking because I know SSD's are already much better than HDD's regarding power consumption but if you can have it turn off after 1 minute of idle and power back on when in use then you could get even longer battery life. But is this good for the SSD and would there ever be a noticeable pause as the SSD turns on? I know on a hard drive the platters have to get to speed, and I'm assuming even an SSD runs through a brief firmware check before being utilized.

Ideas, thoughts?

 

Just a guess?

SSD's do not care about power cycles at all - only writes and possible reads (if reads are in the millions...).

As to how long it take to power on - since all my mechanical drives power on fast enough for me (I have them set to 1 minute power off on idle), I think it is safe to say that SSD's power on time will be negligible (at least to me).

This is an interesting question though - hope we get some good/real/concrete info.

 

I've always wondered weather the power option of "stop hard disk rotation" actually saves any power or does anything when you have an SSD installed.

 

Agreed. SSD is more like RAM than a mechanical disk. An SSD also uses much less power than HHD even when working flat out.

 

Well also certain Toshibas have that feature where it will move the HDD read head to safe position if it detects the chassis is moving, but does that affect an SSD? Or does it know there's an SSD and doesn't do anything?

 

It probably wouldn't matter, as all that really consists of would be the hardware sending a signal to the HDD to park it's heads (unless the accelerometer is part of the HDD itself, like some of the HDDs with self-contained free-fall sensors), and unless the SSD has coopted that signal for something else (unlikely, I'd think), it would just come up as an unrecognized command to the SSD, and nothing would happen.

 

The status of a cell can be checked without damaging the substrate so even lots of reads should be no problem.

 

Try the free SDDlife program

http://ssd-life.com/SSDlifeFree.exe

 

I've had my OCZ Vertex 30 GB drive now for like...3 months. Is this good it's already down to 97% health?

 

Is this the part where I start to feel a bit worried?

 

Not when you have a Kingston V-series SSD. It sucks power. Kingston V+ is really good, but I found out the hard way that V-series really consumes a lot of power, almost as much as an HDD, if not more, when idle.

Either way, I realize now that I have my Intel 80GB in there, it sips power, 0.06W idle, compared with 1.36W idle for the Kingston V. A laptop scorpio black only uses 0.85W when idle.

 

Seems this program uses the same SMART attributes as CrystalDiskInfo and few drives actually report the same way. There was a discussion here somewhere about that, and generic reporting software is generally inaccurate. Best to use a program from the manufacturer if it exists.

 

This is my ThinkPad, which I use at school and for other kind of stuff I don't want to do with my Qosmio. I keep my Qosmio more 'clean', the OS and all. But, I now really wonder what the uptime for my SSD in Qosmio is...

 

In your case your writes are 40x times the capacity of the drive, so that would make more sense. But even then with MLC NAND having 10,000 write life, 40 writes is less than 0.5% of total writes. Although I do hear Sanforce drives use cheaper chips, but even if it's half (5,000 writes) it's still less than 1% of its useful life.

I just wouldn't put any faith in these utilities. Out of curiosity, run CrystalDiskInfo and see what it reports.

 

Ah, I understand. I'll however check how many hours my SSD in Qosmio has been en for.

BTW. do you want me to put up CrystalDiskInfo results for my drive here? I can do that if it will help for anyone..

 

Hours aren't critical, but writes are. I'm also suprised you're not seeing significantly diminshed performance as full as your drive is.

If you wouldn't mind posting the CrystalDiskInfo I'd be interested, thanks.

 

My SSD showed 97% health in SDDLlife and CrystalDiskInfo , but after flashing to the latest firmware , it`s now showing 100% health and an estimated 10 year lifespan

 

Actually, I'm not seen any decrease in performance. And yes, my SSD is quite full loaded.

However, here is a Screenshot of CrystalDiskInfo


Also, don't forget that this is not my Qosmio.

This is my Thinkpad T61. T7250 @ 2.00 Ghz, 4GB RAM, nVidia Quadro NVS 140M

However, here is some other benchmarks from my Qosmio. Including some SSD testing:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/6849924-post3067.html

 

See about a firmware flash like Tinderbox UK indicated. Although I think its a destructive flash so you would have to image or reinstall your data. Imaging is a mixed bag because if it gets out of alignment then it definitely would cause performance issues.

 

Holy crap your 256 GB SSD is nearly full....lol

I thought SSD performance gets worse then it gets towards being full..

 

lol no programs work with crucial C300 SSD's.. i can't measure health at all... is there some program which works?