Besides performance advantages of SSDs, one thing manufacturers like to make claims about is their supposedly superior power consumption over traditional mobile hard disks. Well, just like how we recently reported about unexpectedly high failure rates of SSDs, it turns out that the power consumption of the average SSD not only fails to improve upon 5400RPM hard disks, but also gobbles more energy than even a 7200rpm 2.5" drive! At least that's what Tom's hardware has found in its extensive set of benchmarks recently carried out.
In the benchmark, Tom's hardware compared 4 SSDs against a 200GB Hitachi 7200 2.5" hard disk that were handy in its test lab, all using a Dell Latitude D630 laptop. What they found was very surprising. While all the SSDs blew away the HDD for read performance and seek time, the hard disk gave the longest run time of just over 7 hours in this test machine. Two of the SSDs, the Crucial and Mtron Flash 32GB SSDs, consumed so much power that they both reduced the battery life by about an hour! The tests were run using Mobilemark 07, which keeps the laptop and drive busy by simulating usage.
While in theory hard disks are rated with higher power consumption figures than SSDs, what Tom's hard ware found is that hard disks only consume their maximum power when randomly seeking, somewhere between 2 and 4 watts while randomly seeking. Their power consumption is very low when idle or reading sequentially, at between 0.5 and 1.3 watts. However, they found that SSDs on the other hand consume their maximum power when in use, not just when "seeking".
One other thing Tom's hardware found is that the power consumption of 1.8" SSDs is no lower than 2.5" SSDs, yet, 1.8" hard disks consume significantly less power (maximum 2 watts) than 2.5" hard disks. So those who plan getting an SSD instead of a hard disk for an ultra-compact laptop may end up with a significantly reduced runtime. Also, those who replace their existing laptop hard disk with an SSD, primarily for better battery life, will also experience disappointment.
So it looks like after all this time, at least none of these SSD manufacturers have actually benchmarked their hard disk against traditional hard disks in real world tests. As Tom's hardware said, surely they would have noticed the extra power consumption, particularly when all four SSDs benchmarked could not even beat the high end 7200rpm 2.5" Hitachi drive, never mind a 5400rpm 2.5" drive.
(edited reaction, removed non constructive comments)
if you understand the technology, you'll realise that the testing methodolody used was wrong and the ssd's under test actually did the test many more times in the same period, hence they used more power... have a clue about what you write and report.^ if you go on like that you'll have a heart attack before you even turn fifteen.
The whole point in putting them into newer notebooks is because they do use less power and generate less heat. The test was flawed.
My research on the net has led me to think that there is no advantage in powerr savings by switching to a SSD. At least this is the findings I read about when it comes to mini notebooks like the MSI Wind.
Couple to that, the very high price right now and the reduced capacity and I cannot justify SSD at this point.
One test swapped out an 80 gig HDD with a SSD of a smaller capacity- I think 20 gig...the notebook did not demonstrate any longer battery life under normal use. Another strange thing, is the notebook booted faster with the HDD.
Power guzzler might be a stretch, but they certainly don't SAVE any significant amount of power over a standard, much larger and very much cheaper-HDD.
I know what my next notebook will have...an Atom processor and a roomy HDD. If you want to save power- run with an Atom proc. 
This message was edited at: 04-07-2008 14:38
@Anthony...strange reaction...I did not saying this regarding knower's mention of Tom's hardwares findings. If people had saw the language, insults and tone of what knower originally wrote, which has now thankfully been completely edited out by the mods, from both his original post and my quoted response, you will see why I had said this as my response to it.
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