Power consumption DVD drive vs External hard drive

Gidday guys.

I am tossing up whether to load movies on to an external 2.5" drive to use when I am on long flights, as a few people have told me it will use a lot less battery life than using the notebooks DVD drive. Any thoughts? (And it doesn't clutter up my notebook drive!)

Regards to all.

 

That would seem odd to me since it's still has to spin just like the internal one.

 

I'm trying to compare the Notebook DVD drive to the 2.5" external, NOT the Notebook hard drive to the 2.5" external.

 

I see. The hard drive definitely uses less power. Since you've got a 160GB hard drive why not throw them on there. Having used external drives it can a pain to have the thing hanging off the side especially in a place with tight quarters like a plane.

 

I would use DVD Shrink to make reduced size copies of the DVDs which you then run from the internal HDD (or a USB flash drive). I would expect that an external 2.5" HDD would pull at least as much power as the internal optical drive which should be fairly power efficient when spinning gently for DVD playback. In fact, if you could persuade the internal HDD to power down during DVD playback then playing from a disc might be the best.

Do some tests while you are still on the ground. You don't need to play a whole DVD to get an idea of the battery rundown rate but it would also be prudent to check whether your notebook's battery still has the claimed capacity.

John

 

Best thing to save power but only worth it if you have some spare time to crunch the movies down in size say leave it overnight.

USe DVD decryter or similar to copy movie to hard drive. Then convert it to h.264 (I use meGUI to do this) bitrate of 800 to 900 works perfect for normal DVD's. You should end up with a 2 hour movie taking up around 800mb. Then stick this on a flash stick and play it from there. With a 4gig flash stick you could fit about 5 movies.

Doing this on my laptop XPS m1330. The CPU goes into its lowest power mode 800mhz, the hard drive turnes off & the DVD drive is not running. Doing this I can get about 4 to 4.5 hours battery life with 7/8 screen brightness.

This may be because I have the Intel turbo memory though. So it might be copying from the USB stick to the Turbo memory and then playing from their but their is no reason it shouldn't be able to just play from teh low power flash stick anyways. Also by encoding to h.264 the graphics card takes over all the processing of the movie (if you have a nvidia 8 series graphics card and are running vista. not 100% sure about other setups). So the CPU can go to sleep aswell so you end up using very little power.