Best 7mm SSD in regard to battery life?

Hi, I know there are lots of posts about SSDs, but they are mostly focused on speed, reliability and other stuff, not so much about battery life.

I want to buy an SSD for my Edge 220s and put it instead of the stock Hitachi 7200rpm 320GB hard disk (which is not bad but often gets hot and sometimes has that annoying ticking sound).

I suppose there's not much choice for an 7mm SSD, so I am thinking about Intel 320 160GB or Crucial M4 256GB. Performance is an important factor but battery life is more important to me.

Any SSD owners that can say if they have better battery life after they switched to SSD, and what the increase was, minimal or noticeable? Which SSD?

Do Cruical M4 256GB and Intel 320 160GB have more or less same power consumption in normal daily usage (browsing, email, MS Office, some photo editing), or is one better than the other?
Or, are there any other 7mm SSDs that are worth considering??

 

Tom's Hardware's 2011 SSD charts has power consumption for 4 different conditions so you can draw your own conclusions.

Also note that many of the 9.5mm SSDs contain a spacer which can be removed so that they fit into 7mm bays. There's a long discussion of this subject in this thread.

John

 

Tom's Hardware has had some... issues regarding testing power consumption:
Tom’s Hardware: We Were Wrong About SSD Power Consumption

Published numbers by manufacturers show that Intel drives have lower power consumption compared to the competition (although I don't know how much to trust those numbers as gospel either). I'd hunt up another review before basing my opinion on just the one from Tom's Hardware.

 

I've been using the Crucial M4 for a while now. Haven't noticed any real difference in battery life from the original 320GB HD. The indicated power consumption is just the same. Battery life is influenced MUCH more by screen brightness.

 

That article is 3 years old so I would hope that Tom has fixed the bug for his 2010 tests.

I've got the Intel 320 and was surprised by Tom's results - I thought it had a lower power consumption. However, I'm not complaining about the overall power consumption of my T420s.

John

 

Sounds like I can't expect much, at least in regard to improved battery life...

Thanks John, that Tom's test is really thorough. I was quite surprised at how Crucial M4 performed vs Intel 320. It's very fast, although it draws a bit more power than Intel 320. It's interesting that Crucial's idle power draw (so the test says) is only 0.11W, whereas Intel's is 0.86W. That seems odd.

I've checked some other sites, and it looks like Crucial M4 and Intel 320 can't even be compared performance wise. Crucial really flies... And I read that they released a new firmware that makes the drive even faster. The power draw is slightly higher than Intel's though.

So, I was thinking that there must be some logic in thinking that the faster drive will get the job done faster, and will go and idle sooner? My current Hitachi HD will take 5 sec to load something, whereas SSD will take only 1 sec to load the same thing, and will spend at least 3-4 times less power for the same job?
Don't know, maybe this logic totally doesn't apply to real world use, but there must be some difference...

Anyway, I think I will go for it and get Crucial M4.
Even if there is no change in battery life then at least I'll need to wait less for computer to finish what it needs to do.

 

I believe that SATA-600 also results in slightly increased power drain: More effort is needed to make all those bits fly backward and forward faster. One model I would look out for is the latest Samsung (can't remember the model number). They usually provide a good balance between performance and power consumption.

John

 

My M4 has been great ... never really did do a comparision in wattage though. When I was researching, this was one of the lower benchmarked on power consumption though.

Crucial M4 CT128M4SSD2 128GB in x220 – modded to 7mm | Vivi The Mage

 

Just ordered Crucial M4 256GB.

I looked at the power consumption specifications of a built in Hitachi 320GB 7200rpm drive, and for a HD it doesn't really have a very good power consumption, compared to some other drives. Idles at 1 watt, normal operation at 1.7 watts.

I did a very plain test with the Hitachi HD - I exited all applications, waited a bit till the power usage stabilized around 7 watts (looking with BatteryBar), and then in Windows explorer I copied a 10GB file from one folder to another.
The power usage jumped 4.1 watts during file copying, and went down where it was before it when finished (after extra 20sec). CPU usage was almost nothing during copying, so I suppose those 4.1 watts were just the hard disk reading and writing.
That's 60% power consumption increase, which is quite a lot.

I wonder how much power SSDs would consume in a same scenario...

 

I suspect that more than half the increase in power consumption is due to the increased CPU activity: The CPU can't spent so much of its time sleeping if data is being transferred. You could rerun your test with Task Manager showing CPU usage to see what increase there is in CPU activity during the data transfer.

John

 

I was looking at the CPU activity with a small handy program called Performance Monitor (a small graph of CPU activity on a desktop, consumes hardly any CPU), and it was minimal, but I did a test again, this time with Window's Resource Monitor.

I did the test on Power Saver battery plan, with both min and max CPU set at 5%, so CPU max frequency was minimal. During file copying Windows Explorer was using only 2% of CPU, whereas Performance Monitor was using 3%, before and during the copying.

Anyway, when copying started the power consumption went up 3.6 watts. Of that, I don't think CPU could have used more than 0.1 or 0.2 watts, which would leave some 3.5 watts for hard disk, which, after all, is both reading and writing during this test. Still, it's quite something if let's say "normal" power usage is around 8 watts...

But then, right after the test, I noticed some strange power consumption drops and ups, and then finally realized that when most of the screen is dark (I had a darker wallpaper) the power usage was almost 1 entire watt lower than when most of the screen is white (any open window, or bright wallpaper).
I did more testing, and when wallpaper is black, with all windows minimized, the power consumption is exactly 1 watt less on my E220s (12.5 inch screen) than when wallpaper is white. This is on max brightness.

This is really interesting! I had no idea that laptop displays behave similar to AMOLED phone displays where a white pixel consumes 10-20 times more power than a black pixel.

Ha ha, you can noticeably increase your battery life if you make your window background black with white letters!

 

Intel's 320 Series solid-state drive - The Tech Report - Page 9

Some charts of SSD power consumptions against a popular HDD. Takeaway is going to SSD will reduce idle and load consumption by 4-6 watts.

 

Note that the HDD in that review is a 3.5" desktop drive. The power saving relative to 2.5" notebook HDDs will be much less. However, the relative differences between the SSDs are valid.

John