The "on or off, low power or full power" might hold some ground... but even so, SSD's typically use less power full load than low load/spin hard drives... This is a TH review that I would not make references to.

Timothy Sottek @ Jul 1st 2008 9:37AM

Tom's Hardware just did a recent comparison between SSD power consumption and traditional platter drives.

If you're going to put that in a laptop beware: SSDs drain batteries FASTER than platter drives!


BobTurbo @ Jul 1st 2008 9:54AM

"SSDs drain batteries FASTER than platter drives!"

Correction: The SSDs tested using TH's methodology did not perform as well as the platter HDD.


Timothy Sottek @ Jul 1st 2008 10:08AM

Correction, part deux:

"However, we have discovered that the power savings aren’t there: in fact, battery runtimes actually decrease if you use a flash SSD."

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html

BobTurbo @ Jul 1st 2008 10:19AM

Nope, I don't think you understand yet. Let me come back tomorrow and see if anything has changed.

(AND FINALLY)


Jeff @ Jul 1st 2008 12:36PM

I'll be less vague than Bob. The TH article was, as usual, significantly flawed. The benchmark they used to test battery life restarts itself after each completion, doing so until the battery is dead. However, the article did not report how many times the benchmark was able to run on the SSD vs. the mechanical HD.

The reason this is a critical flaw is that, as their own graphs show, the performance of the SSD was substantially better than the other HD. With a slower drive, the CPU spends a larger proportion of time in idle mode, as the system is blocking on IO, waiting for the slow drive to return data.

With the faster SSD, the CPU spends less time idling. It is using more power, but also doing more work. If TH had reported the number of times the benchmark ran on each machine, we would have seen the SSD machine run the benchmark many times more than the mechanical drive. Their conclusions are flat-out wrong.

The whole exercise was very silly to begin with. An SSD draws less power in use than a mechanical drive does while idle. Of course it will improve, or at least not effect, battery life. The article you reference is just another sad example of the decade-long slump Tom's Hardware has faced.

Naturally, I will be taking both the red and blue pill simultaneously...

I am Legend??

Quick question... although I know this might seem silly to some, wtf is going on in that picture???

Yes, I see the knife.

Is it just me, or does anyone else actually want that lamp?

LoL at 63 million...... I think you meant Trillion with at tah tah tah Tee : )

Don't laze me bro!

@ Wuju

Thanks for saving me time. Standard can I have your babies etc etc

Hai