hard drives for low power

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136314

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136280

one of them is blue, the other is black...how much battery can i expect to use losing the black, and how much performance will i lose taking the blue?

on the other hand, could a SSD give me better performance AND power consumption compared to both of these?

does hdd affect FPS in games? what exactly does a slower hdd effect besides transfer speeds between drives and partitions?

 

The difference is not a lot.
I would suggest the 500GB 5400RPM WD Blue. As the drive fills up, the WD blue edition will be on par if not faster in terms of performance compared to 320GB WD Black edition. Blue edition also uses a little bit less power.

If you get a SSD, it'll help lower the power consumption and give you faster program load time.

SSD usually don't help improve a game or program's performance. Usually only the startup time and loading time are affected. Generally, most programs will be loaded into the ram thus not affected by the SSD when it's running.
For FPS games such as counterstrike source, it'll not affect its performance at all, or none that you'll notice because you'll be limited by the power of the graphic card, not the hdd/ssd speed.

A slow hdd generally affect all areas where the OS needs fast data access. E.g. copy/paste, read, write.

 

Here's the exact comparison you're making - there's not much difference in speed or power consumption between those two specific drives.

Most SSDs do not use significantly less power than HDDs actually, but they are much much much faster.

 

hard drive does not affect fps only loading times ;D

 

interesting...

when you steam movies over a wireless n network (from another computer), does your hard drive spin up? or no, because you aren't really accessing anything on it?

 

In those two options, the WD5000BEVT will yield better battery life, and be nearly as fast as the WD3200BEKT.

Alternatively, check out the Hitachi 5K500.B
It is the most power efficient 500gb 5400rpm harddrive.

K-TRON

 

ive really had bad experiences with hitachi, so they are out of the questions for me.

WD is ma brand, never had a bad HDD from them, even a refurb i got worked flawlessly

witht hat said, on a t500, anyone ahve any idea how much power the blue with save over the black? if its only a few minutes i don't really care, but if were talking 20-30 minutes thats considerate.

 

It will only be a few minutes.

 

Its only going to be about 2-3 minute out of every hour of use

harddrives use around 2.5-4 watts of power under normal use, which is a relatively small percent of the overall power used by the laptop

K-TRON

 

That depends a lot on the laptop and what it is being used for. A difference of 1W is very significant if the computer is using less than 10W (which is what my Dell E6400 can do if I am trying to maximise the battery time). 1W is equivalent to around 1/2 hour.

John

 

hey john, what could i expect from a thinkpad t500 in integrated graphics mode with something like 50% brightness?

10watts seems reaaaallly low for a notebook, no?

 

This is very true.
If you have a standard laptop like my E1505, which uses around 25 watts on battery mode, the performance difference of 1Watt is only a few minutes
On larger laptops like the Clevo D900C which uses around 95 watts on battery, battery life will be near negligable even if 3 higher efficiency drives are used. This is because the harddrive represents a small portion of the power used.
On smaller systems like the E6400 and ultraportables, expect more battery life from a more power efficient drive.

I am not sure of the battery power usage on a T500, but its probably in the neighborhood of 15-20watts. In that case it may be 5-10 minutes more battery life from a more power efficient drive

K-TRON

 

Latest Intel chipset with integrated graphics, P series CPU and LED backlit display are a power efficient combination.

How much battery time do you expect to get from the T500? If you can squeeze 5 hours out of a 55WHr battery then that's an average power drain of 11W. If you can reduce the power consumption by 0.5W then you gain an extra 15 minutes of run time.

John

 

whats a good program to use that can monitor how much power(watts) is being used in real time?? or is there even such program that can do that?

 

The only way to monitor power consumption when on the mains is by using a meter on the mains outlet.

But, you can monitor power drain when running on battery using various programs. I use the battery info page of RMClock, partly because I use RMClock anyway. If you are running OK then Mobilemeter draws a graph of power consumption against time.

John

 

thanks ill give RMclock a try since i am undervolting anyways

 

Awesome John, you are the man with all the answers!!

Well i plan on getting the t500 with the 9-cell battery (85 WH), and dedicated graphics (but when i switch it to integrated i get all the power saving benefit of integrated, right?), with a CCPL screen, not LED, which is know is bad for power.

with those numbers for calculation, any idea of what a watt, 1/2 watt would do?

 

Ask someone for battery life on a T500 with those specs (in hours), divide that by the battery WHr to get how many Watts your computer is consuming then do a calculation back with 1/2 W less.

For example 85 WHr battery lasts 8.5 hours, so that means your computer is running at 10W. Now 85 WHr divide by 10.5W consumption is 8.1 hours of battery life. Or conversely 0.5W is 1/20 or 5% increase in power consumption, this leads to a 1/1.05 ~ 95% of the original battery life which is roughly 8.1 hours.