Thinking of gettign new laptop, want to purchase another harddrive with it but question about power consumption

hello i'm thinking of getting the asus g76 when it comes out in april is that's usually around when they release the next gen asus ROG series. i'm thinking of upgrading the hard drive to an SSD and then using the normal hard drive as a second drive just to store my documents such as music and videos, that's all i'm doing with that second drive. i wouldn't have considered this option but i've read that SSD speeds are slower at lower capacity, so i want to use that HDD to keep my SSD at high storage space availability.

my concern is that would it worth it to have an HDD as a second drive that store my documents only? i mean wouldn't it increase my power consumption? i don't want to spend alot of extra money to power a second hard drive. i've read that a normal HDD uses only around 10w on average and costs like $10 a year to maintain, that true?
also, what effect would that have on my battery life, a significant amount? moderate amount? or basically none?
and how about heat? wouldn't a second drive, especially an HDD generate alot of extra heat?

so those are my questions, please help me if you can. i would buy another SSD if i could but it would cost too much.

 

When you don't use a mechanical hard drive (as in, you're not reading/writing files to it), Windows powers it down automatically. So no, an extra HDD won't result in a meaningful increase in power consumption. And even if it somehow did, all you need to do is replace one of your 60W or 100W lightbulbs with a more efficient LED lightbulb and bam! You've massively offset any difference that an extra HDD could make. Same idea with heat, since heat output is related to power consumption.

And technically, yes, smaller SSDs will be slower than the same model SSD but a larger capacity, but subjectively you won't notice this. What makes a SSD feel "snappy" is the random access time, which is pretty much the same for SSDs across the board. You will have a difference in seq. read and write speeds, but this only matters if you're transferring large, GB-sized files from one SSD to another; otherwise, you'll be bottlenecked by the slowest part anyway (for example, the HDD in a SSD-to-HDD file transfer).

 

when you say windows powers it down automatically, you mean it gets shut off or just goes to a really low power state? also does only newer windows support this or does windows xp support this too since i'm using xp atm.

als, i heard that SSD with "trimming" and maintain it's speeds even at lower capacity? but the OS needs to support this feature too right? does windows 7 support it? sorry, i haven't upgraded my computer in like 7 years, my current laptop is an inspiration 1520 lol, i need an upgrade badly. and while you mention that the power consumption is small and won't cost me much, i'm pretty sure that small would still have a noticeable effect ony laptop li-ion battery life since these batteries are not that great?

 

In Windows 7 and 8 (and, iirc, Vista, since Vista/7/8 share the same underlying platform), the idle HDD powers down until you start using it again. So long as you (or your programs) leave it alone after X number of minutes (depending on the power plan you're using), it'll park its head and shut down. Though even if it was just going into some low power state, that would be so low that it might as well be considered turned off.

I don't remember what the default settings are in XP for this situation, since I haven't used that OS in a few years.

TRIM doesn't lower the capacity of a SSD, it's just low-level software that handles SSD garbage collection (grossly simplifying it, but you can read more about TRIM here). Windows 7 is "SSD aware", so if it detects that you have a SSD installed, it'll recognize this and act accordingly (set up TRIM on that drive, turn off indexing on that drive, etc.).

Most laptops still use Li-Ion batteries, with a few using Li-Poly batteries (in terms of battery life, there isn't much difference. It's mostly about wear-leveling). Unlike CPUs, GPUs, storage drives, or even RAM, battery tech is pretty much at a crawl right now since we're running up against basic chemistry at this point (there's only so much energy you can store in the molecules in batteries, and we'll need some sort of radically different energy storage system to change that). If you're worried about the longevity of your laptop battery, laptop batteries will pretty much "go bad" after a few years no matter what you do (again, basic chemistry and wear-and-tear).

 

In any OS, you can change the hard drive sleep settings to your heart's content, so that is not an issue at all. Your hard drive uses the most power when it is being read from or written to, less power when it is on and not being used, and no power when it is off.

But as for the hard drive using too much electricity, that is completely in someone's imagination. Even if it is on and running at full load 24/7/365, it will cost about $2 in electricity, depending on how much it is per kwh where you live. But it won't be running at full load 24/7/365, not even close. Even if you never turn your computer off and have the drive set to stay always on, you would be looking as something more like $0.50 a year in electricity costs.

Basically no effect on either battery life or heat.

 

Are you sure you put the right link there Kuroi, seems to me like a copy/paste fail.

 

What the? I don't even.... (I wasn't even on that site today...how...?)... ....

Link's fixed.

 

Strange, well anyways i sent you a pm with the reason with the edit and which part I removed from the link.

Other than that, you pretty much said anything I would have said aside from the fact that the time it takes to turn the secondary drive off can be set in the power plan options for 7 and 8, it's likely the case for XP too though.

 

Eh. Anyway, I probably should have plugged in some numbers for the cost of running a HDD in various use cases (thanks for the numbers, Qing Dao). I was trying to get that point across with the lightbulb example (lightbulbs use far more power than what a laptop typically uses, given the same length of time).

I'd be more worried about the laptop display, since that eats up the majority of a battery's charge. Lowering the brightness and setting the display to turn off after X minutes will help more with power consumption than adding/removing a HDD or two.

 

thanks for the reply, how do i configure the drive's sleep settings in xp? do i do it in control panel somewhere or is this done in the bios?

 

It should be in control panel -> power options