Samsung 840 SSD short battery life problem

I have an Asus UL30vt that I'm very happy with despite its age. And the main reason for that is its long battery life. In practice I can always get around 7 hours with normal use. It only drops to about 4.5 or 5 hours if I do disc or graphics heavy things such as movie watching.

I wanted to upgrade to an SSD for faster speeds. I was told battery life would be comparable or better.

I bought a Samsung 840 and installed it. We did a fresh installation to remove bloat and I still haven't finished reloading all the old programs. But when we tested it I typically got 4 hours at the most and often as little as 3 hours 20 minutes of use. This is crazy. This is much worse than with the older hard drive.

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Is this a defective SSD unit? I can send it back to Amazon right away and try buying an 840 Pro to see if that makes a difference.

Any help?

 

Hmm, this is interesting. I'd say you may not have installed the power management drivers/apps properly or aren't using the right settings.
I can't really see any way a mechanical drive would consume less power than a ssd.

 

Perhaps its defective, perhaps its not.

SSD's aren't necessarily lower power. It varies significantly on lot of factors. From looking at Anand's bench, the Samsung SSD achieves top of the line performance in idle power numbers, but is one of the higher power use ones at load. So maybe what's happening is the Notebook does not support all the power management features and the SSD is running at its very high load power figure all the time, reducing your battery life.

Main feature of power management is not to reduce power at heavy load, but reduce in circumstances where there's light load or near idle activity. A fast SSD with proper power management may theoreticaly use high power for very short time but go to low power quick. The thing is while Desktop spinning HDDs use lot more power than regular SSDs, the Notebook HDDs use a lot less power than their Desktop counterparts, reducing the power gap it existed against the SSDs. SSDs can theoretically be lower power because its a LOT faster and can go to idle faster, but it may not be able to.

 

You can use the guide at this site to enable device-initiated power management (DIPM), which should get you back to the battery life you're used to.

 

Hi. I went to the link you gave and checked to see what needs to be done. It seems mine are set to HIPM+DIPM just as noted in the example given. Yet it doesn't seem to help. Do you have any precise settings to suggest? As I type, the machine is still using power at the same rate and Battery Bar shows that full runtime is only 3:59 in theory (consistent with practice). I am a bit of a novice at this, but I tried to follow directions and don't see anything that seems different in my settings. I also changed link power management which had been set to 100 milliseconds to 75 milliseconds.

Any more ideas I can try? I really like the speed of this SSD but if it stays at 4 hours, that means that for all practical purposes I'll be tethered to the power cord at a conference. I'm used to taking this machine with me for a whole day's work without needing to recharge.

If no one suggests anything else, I might just return this SSD and buy an 840 pro to see if that does anything different.

Thanks.

 

1. If the Intel Rapid Storage driver is installed then uninstall it. If it isn't installed then install it.

2. What is the SSD temperature? CrystalDiskInfo should show this. I would expect the temperature to be below 40C under light usage. If it is over 60C then the SSD is working hard (or leaking power). What is the disk Usage shown by Task Manager?

John

 

Can you elaborate on this? I went to Intel and downloaded what seems to be the setup for Intel RST and when I tried to run it, I got an error saying this device is not supported. Can you point me to the right file and tell me exactly what to do?

Thanks for all the help.

 

See:
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. -Support- Drivers and Download UL30VT


Go to 'Other' and download the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager Asus supports. Make sure you choose the correct 32bit or 64bit version of Windows you're running.


Now, go to Device Manager and see the name of the ATA Storage controller - search for this at the Intel download site and find the latest Intel RST drivers for your system.

(I would recommend to download the 'floppy' version and do a manual install - bypassing the IRST program running in the taskbar...).



Good luck.

 

I downloaded the first Asus zip file as you suggested but there were no exe files on it. Only the one PNPINST and when I ran that one it seemed to install a second driver so that when i look at device manager I get two lines for IDE controllers one showing ATA Channel 0 and the other Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA controller, which is the same as it was before PNPINST.

Is that right? Then when I download the Intel Zip, I'm not sure which driver to pick as there are two AHCI Win 7 drivers for the install and I'm worried that I'll hose the system if I do the wrong thing.

Youv'e been a great help but I really know nothing about this so I'm asking for a walkthrough. I can back up to the point just before I did this if necessary since I created a system recovery point just before I tried all this.

Thanks.

 

I suppose you have checked your battery is not on it`s way out, you said the notebook was old, use an app like "hwmonitor" to check the battery wear level.

John.

 

Well with the older standard hard drive, the notebook still runs for 7 hours on most days. With the SSD, I barely make 4.5 hours tops.

 

This is usually a case of having failed to install the required/proper driver and/or failed to install in the drivers in the proper order.


I would not spend time trying to 'solve' this: I would be doing a re-install and ensuring the most up-to-date drivers appropriate for your system are installed in the proper order (including BIOS firmware and 'correct' BIOS settings...).



Take care.