After reading into Tom's Hardware's extensive tests looking into proposed power savings of these new flash-based drives of the future, they made a shocking discovery. Despite the overall performance gains (as expected from flash memory), they found SSD's actually used up significantly more power than normal hard drives found in most laptops. So, what does that mean for the portability market?
Debunked Hype: Solid State Drives vs. The Usual Spinners
"We still believe that flash-based drives will be the future for the performance segment, but they must not become a key component for energy-efficient notebooks and ultra-portables — where performance is secondary — as long as their average power consumption is higher than that of conventional 2.5” notebook hard drives. In fact, even a high-performance 7,200 RPM 2.5” drive provided better overall battery runtime than most of the flash SSDs we put through the Mobilemark test."
And I was all giddy about the SSD featured in the Macbook Air. Looks like I'll be saving a bunch this coming Christmas...
[via Tom's Hardware]
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These tests are baloney. He accessed the drives *constantly* during the benchmark - no users ever do that, and that kind of activity heavily biases the test against SSD's. Typical usage involves accessing the drives for small amounts of data every few seconds to few minutes, and this is where SSD's shine because old-style drives have to keep the drive spun up while it's not doing anything.
Show me tests where the laptops are, say, playing a movie from the drive in question and the SSD drains the battery faster.
view StarManta's profile
This is massive levels of BS. More than anything, I believe its a cynical ploy for some extra ad revenue on a site no one visits any more.
My real life experience with a pair of Thinkpad T61s, one with a 32GB SSD and the other with a 160GB 7200rpm hard disk shows that I get between 15 and 25% more battery life out of my SSD-equipped unit.
Furthermore, as a very wise person on Slashdot pointed out yesterday, the moronic testing methodology they concocted is based on continually spooning data to their testbed's CPU(s); the SSD undoubtedly manages to cycle through their testing program more often meaning that CPU utilization in the SSD-based machine is going to be a lot higher. Not-idle CPUs draw quite a bit more power than idle ones, especially in notebooks, which might throttle down to a quarter of their full speed when not in active use.
view likefunbutnot's profile