SSD+HDD Battery Usage

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jwonno

Active member
As I understand it, SSDs use less energy/power than HDD partly due to not having moving parts, therefore meaning longer battery usage in a laptop.

My question is how does this work with an SSD for the OS + a HDD for media/data/etc? I.e. does the HDD only draw power when accessed and give a mininal increase in power usage from just an SSD?

Thanks
 
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Big_Rich

Silver Level Poster
You can set the HDD to spin down after so long using the advanced power management options, but it will still consume some power. Using a "green/eco" branded drive will also help reduce the power draw, but tbh, compared to the power draw of the CPU/GPU/Screen, I wouldn't worry too much about HDDs.
 
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jwonno

Active member
Tyvm. I knew other components draw more power, was just curious if there was a significant increase.
 
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Garner

New member
I recently put an SSD in my current laptop. 3.5 years old with a rather dead battery (ie the original!) in it, 15 minutes would be all the battery could do on the best of days.

Moving the old mechanical drive to the secondary bay (doesn't spin up unless you access something on it) and putting the SSD (with Windows/etc on it) in made my laptop...

- cooler (front left where the primary drive goes used to get quite hot - its no different to the rest of the case now)
-quieter (in addition to no vibration noise from a mechanical drive, the cooling fan doesn't go anywhere near as fast which is a touch less power drain again)
- Makes it to around 20 minutes battery life now! Woo! heh, hardly groundbreaking I know but DEFINITELY noticeable... even on a very dead battery. I doubt its just the SSD alone, with my old laptop it would often overheat so the fan would be going flat out - doesn't anymore. I suspect thats where a good portion of the power savings have come into play.
 
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jwonno

Active member
Really? Because all the comparison sites I've seen imply that the SanDisk Ultra is the one which is better.

The OCZ Agility 3 scores pretty high here and here. My reason for this choice was volume & ratio of positive reviews I could find for my price point. Can't find as many reviews for the one you suggested.
 
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Big_Rich

Silver Level Poster
Extreme-Vantage-Chart-Marked.png

Source of above benchmark

Another review of the SanDisk Extreme

"The SanDisk Extreme SSD is surprising in a many ways. Just when we thought we had seen the top of what the SF-2281 SSDs are capable of, SanDisk unleashes the Extreme SSD with a unique NAND configuration and firmware that delivered impressive numbers. The results in several areas are astounding, with 4K random write speeds topping 88,324 IOPS and the Extreme posted the top scores in our HTPC and Gaming real world benchmarks, if only by a hair. What really knocked our socks off though are the 4K QD1 random reads of 8,144 IOPS, beating the Intel SSD 520 by 7% and the OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS by 28%. This is largely thanks to SanDisk's own MLC Toggle NAND."

The Extreme gives the Vertex 3 a run for its money... the Agility 3 is blown away.

I don't know where you've got your information from, but the older Sandisk Ultra SSDs have the previous generation SandForce 1222 controllers and are only 3Gbps SATA. The Extreme SSDs are 6Gbps and use Sandforce 2281 controllers. Consequently the Extreme outperforms the Ultra in every possible way.

And finally, those benchmarks you linked in your post... results obtained in 2010 and 2011. That's a looooong time ago in SSD terms!
 
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