The difference between specifications and reality
Tom’s Hardware compared the power draw of SSDs and 7200 rpm disk drives in notebooks under real-world usage scenarios. The SSD-based notebooks had shorter battery life!
How can this be, given that the idle and active power ratings of both devices are comparable?
Disk drives almost always run at or close to idle power consumption rates. SSDs do not. Read the Tom’s Hardware post for a detailed explanation.
This throws another bucket of the cold water of Reality on notebook SSD hype.
The lesson here is to thoroughly evaluate new technologies like SSD in your environment before jumping off the deep end. SSD is no doubt exciting; it just needs a little time to mature.
Can anyone confirm that their SSD laptop has less battery life than their drived version?
1 response so far ↓
Tim Johnson // July 10, 2008 at 10:33 am |
Do we know why? It can’t be the mechanics. Must be the power saving smarts built into to HDD’s that haven’t been ported over to SSD’s. Once that gets figured out SSD should be more efficient.
Still that puts the advantage back in hands of people who know how to do power management for storage – hard drive companies.