SSD reduces battery life!

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html

Unfreaking believable. On a side note, people who have in the old time used compact flash + adaptor to IDE have noticed improved battery life. Also, if you put a write filter (EWF from winXPe) that bounces all writes to ram, should it also help improve battery life as well as prolong the life of the ssd?

 

Firstly using EWF, it will both improve battery life, and the life of the ssd, whilst also improving performance. However your ram will start to get eaten up, meaning you'll have to manually reboot every few days or so, as well as when you want to install any new programs. Also the write cycles of a typical ssd nowadays is so long (up to about 2,000,000) that to be honest i find that mod completely unneccessary.
Secondly porting EWF from the embedded edition of XP, is not strictly legal , so I'd quit while your head.
Thirdly, http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955-14.html
If you look at the scores, all ssds have better power consumption when loaded, compared to the 7k200, although only half of them have better consumption whilst idle. The results are still, very surprising, i'll grant you that. But I wouldn't just read one review and believe that, I'd have to see these tests confirmed in real-life testing, by someone else.

 

Very interesting indeed. Thanks for posting.

 

I'd like to see what Les has to say about this. Tomshardware's explanation is logical; however, independent results are needed and I don't recall Les having the same observations...

 

Anandtech gets to a different conclusion with testing the MBA SSD vs. HDD
http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3226&p=16

 

There's quite a controversy in the discussion below the article. One goes like this:

 

Number 1 does not sound like a strong argument

Number 2 seems correct, but that does not change anything to the outcome of the battery runtime test.

 

If the sandisk uses less power at LOAD than the hitachi hdd uses at IDLE, then there should be no freaking way the hitachi would be more efficient if only the power draw of the drives were benched.

 

You guys must realize that harddrives are more power efficient than SSD's.
This has been known for quite some time.
Most harddrives on the market run a 5V line at 0.8Amps or so. This is 4 watts of power under normal usage.
I know that nand memory is much less pwoer inefficient. The more memory used the greater the power draw. Memory is essentially a capacitive cell, which requires power. Some desktop memory manufacturers used to state the current from their memory cards and it worked out to be 2.4 watts per Gb. Now for a 10gb ssd, that would mean 24 watts of power. Well this rating was back when the highest memory per alloted memory chip was 256mb. So each memory cell uses about 0.6 watts of power. Technology has advanced and memory has become more efficient with 2,4, and now even 8gb of storage per memory cell. I am not sure of the power constraints but it sure is lower in ratio than it used to be.
I would not be surprised if SSD's are rated at 2.5amps of current instead of 0.8 or so as most mechanical drives are. You are not paying for battery life with an SSD, you are getting reliability and high speeds with near 0 access times.
Plus the current taking from the drive is not directly correlated to heat. A mechanical drive will always run hotter since it has moving parts. A SSD has no moving parts, so the only heat is generated by the memory cells which you are using. The more memory your using the more power the SSD is using.

K-TRON

 

TH continues it's rapid dive into mediocrity with one last ditch attempt to generate any interest in the site again...

 

In my opinion they succeeded. These results are very controversial.

 

Posted an opinion on New SSD Thread.

 

Complete BS that SSD's use more battery power. With my HP 2510P and a 6 cell battery and a 100GB ZIF PATA spinning at 4200RPMS netted me 6hours and 25 minutes of battery life. I just recently installed a Sandisk 32GB SSD and my battery life is 7hours and 55 minutes. I'm betting using a 9 cell battery will yield me 10hours.

 

Sometimes they save power, somestimes they use more power.

http://blog.laptopmag.com/in-depth-with-the-ocz-core-series-low-cost-ssd/2

 

Technically speaking the SSD should have less power consumption due to no moving mechanical parts.

But the way its implemented could make it inefficient.