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512GB SSD Power Consumption?

I

iceberg888

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 2, 2010
15
0
San Francisco, CA
What's up with the power consumption on these 512GB SSDs? Anandtech lists the 512GB Samsung 830 power consumption at idle at over 3x of the 256GB version! I want to upgrade in size (got the Apple 128GB SSD now), but not if my battery life goes to zilch.

If I care about battery life, should I stick with the 256GB Samsung 830 or would the power drain be negligible to move to the 512GB Crucial M4? (I'd like the space and am willing to pay for the the M4, but if my battery life stinks or it's not a reliable as the 830, I'll stick with the smaller size until the newer manufacturing processes can make the higher capacity drives less power hungry.)

Would love to hear from anyone that upgraded from a 256GB 830 to a 512GB M4 in terms of battery life and reliability.

Thanks!
 
iceberg888 said:
What's up with the power consumption on these 512GB SSDs? Anandtech lists the 512GB Samsung 830 power consumption at idle at over 3x of the 256GB version! I want to upgrade in size (got the Apple 128GB SSD now), but not if my battery life goes to zilch.

If I care about battery life, should I stick with the 256GB Samsung 830 or would the power drain be negligible to move to the 512GB Crucial M4? (I'd like the space and am willing to pay for the the M4, but if my battery life stinks or it's not a reliable as the 830, I'll stick with the smaller size until the newer manufacturing processes can make the higher capacity drives less power hungry.)

Would love to hear from anyone that upgraded from a 256GB 830 to a 512GB M4 in terms of battery life and reliability.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I can't comment on the comparison between power consumption between the 256 and 512GB drives but I do know one of the MAJOR criticisms that all these people on the Samsung 830 SSD bandwagon are failing to see is that power consumption at peak performance is VERY VERY high. Apart from performance being pretty good the only upside is that the idle power consumption is pretty low. I just purchased a SanDisk Extreme 480GB SSD, which has a little worse idle power consumption but it has much better peak power consumption than Samsung 830. I will let you know how it affects my battery life in my late 2011 Macbook Pro once I have time to install it myself.
 
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I wonder, how doe the Samsung 830 SSD compare to the Crucial M4, and how do BOTH SSD's compare to the stock 500GB 5200RPM Apple HDD?
 
SR71 said:
I wonder, how doe the Samsung 830 SSD compare to the Crucial M4, and how do BOTH SSD's compare to the stock 500GB 5200RPM Apple HDD?
Click to expand...

If the stock drive was 500GB, it was probably a Toshiba like the one sold here at OWC: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Toshiba/MK5076GSX/

The idle power listed their is 0.55W, but for a traditional platter, it probably doesn't spend a whole lot of time at idle compared to an SSD so the read/write specs are more relevant. According to Anandtech, the 512GB 830 has an idle power of 1.22W vs. 0.38W for the 256GB 830. They list the 256GB Crucial M4's idle power consumption at 0.66.

In read/write however, the SSDs, especially the Samsung, hog lots of power (more than what I see listed in the Toshiba specs). But since they are much faster than the platter, the total Watt per MB is actually lower as they can return to idle much faster.
 
Ok so I finally installed my SanDisk Extreme 480GB SSD last night. Took 25 minutes to do. Then restored from my apple time machine, and enable TRIM. It's working great. I haven't noticed any loss of battery life with this size of a drive yet but I will let you guys know if I begin to notice anything wrong with it or decreased battery.
 
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true

Can this possibly be true, the 512GB sucks power at 2x the speed of the 256GB drive?
 
i have the 512gb samsung 830 and my MBP still gets 7 hours+. This is also including a 750gb HDD in my optibay.

even if it does use more power then the 256GB 830 it uses a lot less then the Stock HDD that came with my mac
 
Prime85 said:
even if it does use more power then the 256GB 830 it uses a lot less then the Stock HDD that came with my mac
Click to expand...

Not necessarily true. HDDs can spin down and generally consume very little power while the heads aren't seeking. SSDs have pretty much constant power usage. Though newer ones are better about this.
 
aaronw1986 said:
battery life?
Click to expand...

Ok I can def. say that I feel like my battery life is at least 45 mins to 1 hour more on my macbook pro since installing the SanDisk 480gb ssd. I also went to the extent of doing all the SSD tweaks to it including enabling TRIM support, preventing spotlight from indexing, turning off the hard drive sudden motion sensor, turning off time machine snapshots, turning off hibernation mode, and turning off hard drive sleep.

There are a few other that I wanted to do but I couldn't get to work after trying it a few times like: set noatime flag and using RAM for temporary files.
 
Newbie MacUser said:
Ok I can def. say that I feel like my battery life is at least 45 mins to 1 hour more on my macbook pro since installing the SanDisk 480gb ssd.
Click to expand...

Wow. That's great. I'll have to check out the SanDisk as it is really competitively priced. But I thought it's a SF-based controller, and people seem to say avoid Sandforce (unless it's in an Intel SSD)?
 
iceberg888 said:
Wow. That's great. I'll have to check out the SanDisk as it is really competitively priced. But I thought it's a SF-based controller, and people seem to say avoid Sandforce (unless it's in an Intel SSD)?
Click to expand...

It's not JUST a run in the mill Sandforce 2281 controller. It has 24nm synchronous Toggle NAND which is reguarded and the highest quality memory among the sandforce controllers. It is still considered Tier 1 on Tom's Hardware Hierarchy of SSD's.

Did I mention I purchased a Squaretrade warranty on it, which superseeds the manufacturer warranty because they will give you your purchase price back if it craps out? So I'm pretty covered even in the unlikely event it fails. Furthermore my macbook backs up to my time capsule once a day. So I doubt I will ever lose anything too critical.
 
SandForce controllers have a failure rate of something like 4% over three years. Other manufacturers have a failure rate of less than 1% over the same amount of time.

An SSD might be gobbling more power at maximum load than HDDs, but keep in mind it's reading/writing multiple times faster than the HDD. It will get the job done faster, which means an overall lowering of power consumption.
 
terraphantm said:
Not necessarily true. HDDs can spin down and generally consume very little power while the heads aren't seeking. SSDs have pretty much constant power usage. Though newer ones are better about this.
Click to expand...

That statement was from my own experience. I have gained anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour extra of battery life with my 512GB Samsung 830 then i had with the HDD.
 
Prime85 said:
That statement was from my own experience. I have gained anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour extra of battery life with my 512GB Samsung 830 then i had with the HDD.
Click to expand...

I don't understand when this shifted to HDD. The original question was in regards to the difference in power consumption between 256 and 512 SSD.
 
aaronw1986 said:
I don't understand when this shifted to HDD. The original question was in regards to the difference in power consumption between 256 and 512 SSD.
Click to expand...

Well logic dictates that more chips = more power usage. It shouldn't be enough to effect battery life by more than a few minutes though.
 
512gb m4

I can't give you any insight into a comparison between the drives, but since I installed my 512GB M4 (which replaced a stock Apple 500GB 7200rpm) my battery has gone up around 30-45mins under the same workload so I'm really happy. Although, I did do a clean install of Mountain Lion to blow away all my unused apps, so maybe that improved battery (although I know alot of people don't believe in clean installs, old habits die hard!).

I assumed that an SSD can rush to idle much quicker rather than an overworked HDD thrashing around, so saves battery that way, even if it has as high load draw. Also, I haven't experienced any freezing or stability issues with my M4. Not a blip since install so I'm delighted. Hope that helps...
 
Energy Difference is Negligible.

I think the 512GB SSD would use slightly more power than a 256GB SSD. Simply due to there being being more NAND chips or circulatory to power on the 512; when under full load. Albeit, the difference in power would have to be such a negligible amount, and Mavericks does a lot to maximise the battery life of laptops any ways.

A factor worth noting though, is that new SSDs (2013 onwards) are now using the PCI-e interface instead of the traditional SATA connection. Whether this saves more power, I'll presume yes, but a PCI-e interface definitely provides more faster read/write speeds as seen in countless reviews.

Here are some SSD energy consumption links if you're still paranoid. I would have to say, the biggest factor driving people away from 512GB SSDs is the AUD ~$350 price difference, for only an additional 256GBs! (You could easily buy 3-4TBs SSHD/HDD worth of external storage with that cash or save it for something else).

http://ssdreview.com/review/compare...512gb-25-inch-cxm03b1q/power_consumption.html

http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/514...56gb-and-512gb-ssds-tested-energy-consumption

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1682593/
 
I know this is an old thread but the last time I was at an Apple store, I'm pretty sure I saw that the 1TB rMBP config was rated at only 7 hours battery life compared to 8 hours on the 512GB model.

As far as I know, that was the only difference so I would assume the larger SSD does indeed consume more power.
 
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