Envy 14: 160gb Intel SSD or 120gb OCZ Agility 2

I came across a few benchmarks over at Anandtech.

*NOTE* The 100gb Agility 2 and the 120gb Agility 2 are nearly identical in performance/power consumption.

First off is performance comparison:
160gb Intel X-25M G2 vs 100gb OCZ Agility 2

But the one i was more interested in was the power consumption difference:
Power Consumption at idle and load

At idle they are nearly identical. Only a .09 watt difference. But at load the difference is 1.92-2.05w.

Most people in the battery life forum with the Intel SSD are getting around 4.5 hours battery life, which is close to 13whr, on a 59whr battery. Now the difference between 13whr and 11whr on a 59whr battery is almost 50min.

Is my math wrong someplace? I know i will more than likely not be at load, or at the load they were at during the power consumption test, at all times. So the power savings won't be the best possible 50min, but even if you figure your doing something on your notebook 50% of the time, that's still a 25min gain on battery life.


EDIT: I can get the Agility 2 for around the same price as it costs to upgrade the HDD/SDD option to the Intel drive for the E14. Though the $ per GB will obviously be slightly higher on the Agility 2 since it has less space. But the cost of ownership is the same, and as long as i don't need more then 120gb (which i don't), then the issue is moot. Also going with the Agility 2 gives me an extra 320gb HDD i can use for external storage.

 

They should be pretty similar, but it will come down to how much space you need: 120gb or 160gb?

 

Agreed; the time your drive spends at full utilization is going to be VERY small. I know you said something about 50% 'busy', but that's not going to be true in real life.

In real life, your drive will be very busy during boot, during application load, and during shutdown. The rest of the time will be idle time. I'll go out on a limb and suggest that, with an SSD, a four hour span of using your machine might result in 10% average utilization of the disk over those four hours.

So really, you may experience slightly less battery life, only because the majority of your disk's power consumption will be at idle.

 

This.

If you don't mind the lower size and the 320GB will be useful to you as an external drive, then you can go ahead and get the Agility, but don't expect a difference of more than a couple minutes per charge when comparing the two SSD's. If battery life is your main concern, it's negligible in this case. As AlbequerqueFX said, the amount of actual drive usage on an average charge should be low enough that it won't make a noticeable difference.