Do Optibay SSDs ruin battery life?

If I took out my optical drive and replaced it with an SSD, would battery life be lowered at all?

Also, in general, do SSDs increase battery life over 5400rpm Hard Drives?

 

SSD's have an idle power consumption that Optical drives do not.
Also, chances are that you will be accessing that drive quite a bit more than the drive you don't feel is needed.

The additional power draw will indeed lower your battery life, but less than that of the addition of an Optidrive spinning HDD.

 

Do you already have an SSD in your primary hard drive slot or did you just put the SSD in your optical bay? Theoretically, you should install it where your primary hard drive is and then move your hard drive to where the optical drive was located (unless you were lucky enough to pick up a 15" MBP with two SATA III connections).

Either way, I doubt the additional idle power draw (or overall power draw) from the SSD is going to do much to your real world battery life. Additionally, although SSDs do consume less power than HDDs, it isn't anything drastic in real world situations. My MBP still goes for about 6.5-7 hours on a single charge now that it has only a 120GB SSD instead of 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive.

SSDs don't really benefit systems from their lower power consumption (it isn't drastic enough) but rather from their lack of moving parts and blazingly fast read and write speeds.

 

Do you void your warranty with an optibay SSD?

 

Optibays do technically void Apple's warranty. They won't touch a MBP if it has an optibay installed. That is why the original Super Drive must be re-installed before Apple handles the MBP.

 

it takes less power than a standard drive, but compared to the optical drive it uses about the same

 

Only if you're using the optical drive as much as you're using the SSD.

 

I recently got a Crucial M4 128GB SSD...updated to the 0009 firmware before installing it in my 2011 MBP 15" (2.0Ghz i7).
I replaced the HDD with the SSD, expecting battery life to either stay the same or improve slightly...it's actually got worse (by around 40%).
So much so that I'm taking it out tonight and putting the HDD back in...even though performance wise it's fantastic.

Currently trying to find someone with a 2011 MBP and a fully working SSD that doesn't have that problem with battery life.

 

Depends on the SSD. Some are horrible with power consumption while others just sip it. You primarily want to look for one with low idle power consumption. Many are 1/2 to 1/3 the power of a traditional hard drive.

Also when you first get an SSD there's a lot of background garbage collection going on with the SSD, because of installing OS, apps, etc. But once it's done, it's only occasional minor garbage collection and the SSD remains idle most of the time for most users.

The Crucial M4 is average power consumption at idle ~ 0.7W and average at load ~ 3.0W. But still should be about same or better than most 5400RPM HDD's. I would also let the computer idle for a long time after you get it set up (like overnight) and make sure power options don't turn the drive off, otherwise it can't do its garbage collection.

 

Me. I have a F120

 

I only have SATA III in my hard drive slot.

I will probably upgrade to SSD when 512 GB SSDs become ~$200.... so not for another couple of years probably.

But a 5400rpm HD in an optibay WOULD lower my battery life significantly, correct?

 

Which MBP do you have?
And what's the battery life like?

 

Thanks HTWingnut
This was a brand new drive, with a fresh install of Lion on it.
I enabled TRIM in Lion, but admittedly I didn't leave it to idle, since I was under the impression it wasn't needed. I'll give it a try though thanks.

 

mbp 13 2011 base model with 8gb of ram

battery life

video playing from the SSD = 5h ish
Productivity (dreamweaver, fireworks, illustrator) = 6-7h
web surfing (no flash) = 7-8h
studying (pdfs, word, excel, access) = 10-11
working = 5-10h

 

Normally you shouldn't have to do anything special, but when you install a lot of stuff, it does a lot of stuff to keep things "cleaned". It will still do it, albeit when the system is idle, will only take longer. I just leave my computer sit overnight with a fresh install, that way I know it's done and out of the way. Although they never publish how its best to let your computer idle. Some even say log out (for Windows at least) and leave the PC on. Others do garbage collection every idle second that's available. Depends on the controller and the company, unfortunately never published so it's only by trial and error from users.

 

Then you would want the SSD in your primary hard drive slot since it would be able to operate at the full SATA III speeds whereas it would have to step down if you put it in the optical bay drive. Putting in a secondary hard drive where your optical drive is would have some affect on battery life but, from what I have observed with others, it isn't significant. I know one person with a 2010 15" MBP that has a 64GB SSD in their primary hard drive slot and optibayed a 750GB hard drive in their optical drive slot. They still get about 6.5 hours of use on a single charge, it didn't really change for them.

 

Not really, no. maybe 10% less battery life or so?

I'm still getting 6+ hours on my 17" 2011.

 

HTWingNut - thanks for this. I did as suggested and left it overnight idle'ing (but not set to sleep), also un-ticked the option to let the hard disk sleep where possible.

Anyway, strangely it does appear to have made a difference. My MBP is idling at 85% battery capacity and showing 10h20 battery life!!

I've also done a few tests with both the 5400RPM drive & the SSD installed, this is all done using CoconutBattery 2.7 to measure the power usage.

Screen brightness is 30% in all cases, and for the purposes of the test I've used the 802.11g WiFi connection. No flash on any sites (using Chrome with the FlashBlock extension)
Site note: Interestingly, the ethernet connection uses more power than WiFi, I thought it would have been the other way around but hey-ho.

5400 disk: (very) idle - 8.9 Watts / 8.3 Watts...as low as 7.9
Web surfing , clicking between sites every second or so: 17.4 Watts
Less intensive surfing, browse to a site, leave it on screen: 9.8 Watts
Settings, put hard disk to sleep where possible.

SSD: (very) idle - 8.0 Watts / 7.3 Watts...as low as 6.7
Web surfing, clicking between sites every second or so: 14.6 Watts
Less intensive surfing, browse to a site, leave it on screen: 9.1 Watts
Settings, put hard disk to sleep where possible.

So just based on those results it's fairly clear the SSD is less power intensive, and perhaps I didn't give it enough of a chance to 'bed in'!

Anyway, apologies to the original poster for hijacking the thread, but hopefully you'll be able to find the info useful.

 

Glad to see you got it working out for you. Yeah I've seen some phenomenal improvements in battery life in general, usually use Intel X25-M though. But now I've got a 96GB Kingston in my netbook and 256GB WD in my notebook, 120GB Intel in my Desktop.

 

SSD's do use more power, since they are continuously running as apposed to HDD's.

 

Would you get more battery life if you took the superdrive out and didn't put anything back in there?

I'm thinking you would but it would be low like a 5% increase or so.

 

^^ more important you would make notebook lighter and maybe a bit better air circulation.

I am still thinking about installing optibay with SSD, just not sure how to manage my 3 partitions with windows7 on one of them and bootcamp etc, how it will work out on SSD. Need to find some step by step instruction to this. Or maybe i should wait till 512gb ssd is more affordable =)

 

What are you talking about? HDD's are continuously running unless you set them to turn off after x amount of minutes. They're constantly spinning. The mechanical motion of the drive itself consumes power even if it's not doing anything. SSD's just require a slight charge to keep them "active". You can set your SSD to turn off every minute of idle time, because it's instant "on", where it would take a hard drive several seconds to spin up. Only issue with SSD is it needs to do garbage collection periodically, but if you purposely do this once a week then no problem there. In any case, most SSD's have been shown time and again to consume less energy.

 

Another consideration is which drive is where.
I initially stuck the SSD where the spinner was and put a 750g spinner in the OptiBay.
Huge noise and vibration all the time.

Swapped and all is quiet again.

I have only noticed improved battery life but not done any testing.

256g Samsung in base current 13"I5

Ed

 

Yeah, hdd can make a difference with vibration. Depends on the laptop, much more noticeable in smaller laptops that I've found.

 

Mate, have you not seen the test results I posted on Monday?

Also, SSDs support the idle/sleep modes just like regular HDDs so will draw less power when not in use.

 

Battery life gains would be insignificant if the optical drive was taken out of a MBP unless one use the SuperDrive all day everyday. Additionally, there would not be more air circulation in a MBP due to the lack of the SuperDrive. That would hold true if there was a vent and fan right below the SuperDrive but there isn't. Air comes from one direction and flow out of another, that is it. The SuperDrive isn't going to affect that airflow. Any weight taken out due to the lack of a SuperDrive would also be negligible. We are talking about a few grams out of 3.5+ lbs.

I also hope that you are talking about putting an SSD in the primary hard drive space and then putting the hard drive (or another one) in the optibay. Bootcamp is fine even when Windows is installed on an SSD. I have Windows 7 installed on my current MBP's 120GB SSD. The whole process works the same whether you have an HDD or SSD in a MBP, it doesn't matter. The only drawback is that Windows 7 uses the SSD as an IDE drive instead of SATA III. That just means that it won't be able to get the full potential of the drive but it is still much faster than a standard HDD.

 

I thought I was fairly clear?

When I stuck the hard drive in the Opti-Bay it sounded like a helicopter all the time.
When I stuck the drive where it belongs and the SSD in the opti-bay all was queit again and vibration free.

Maybe not as fast as possible but it sounded like it was going to blow up the other way!

Ed

 

Then you did something wrong, otherwise thousands of MBP owners would be complaining about how their system sounds like its going to blow up when they optibayed their hard drives. The optibay enclosure you were using was right. I have experienced optibayed MBPs first hand and they have not emitted any additional noise over their previous noise levels with just the primary hard drives installed.

 

I called OWC too after the switch and they said it was designed for the ssd to go in the opti-bay for the reason I discovered.

There were no instructions that I recall stating this but it is what they told me?

Either way,it may not be as quick as it can be but it still embarrasses any hard drive easily.

Ed

 

They gave you some BS with that statement and did nothing more than try to get you off of the line (or stop e-mail communications). There would be thousands upon thousands of MBP owners (and MBA owners as well) who are incorrectly using SSDs if they were designed to go specifically in the same slot as the optical bay. Although that can happen, the optical bay in a MBP was technically designed to be used only with the SuperDrive. That is what physically fits and that is why there is a slot on the side of the MBP. Any further modification technically goes against design constraints but that doesn't mean that you can't use the product in that manner. Either way, your noise problem seems to be pretty limited since I haven't experienced it first hand (although I have encountered two MBP's with SSDs in the primary slots and HDD in the optibay) and I haven't really come across anything online. My best guess is that the optibay installation kit you used was garbage or it was installed incorrectly (not to crap on your technical skills).