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7 Hour Macbook Battery

tubbymac

tubbymac

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 6, 2008
1,074
1
I recently swapped out my stock 160 gig hard drive for a 128 gig Corsair SSD on my Macbook Unibody 2.0. It's the same Samsung model with a Samsung controller that Apple uses, just rebranded. Today I looked at the battery meter after a full charge with everything on (wifi, bluetooth, etc) and display at auto brightness and saw 7 hours! I only had the web browser running, so obviously I'll get less doing anything more intensive, but I'm impressed at how efficient this SSD and OSX are at power consumption!
 

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That number is always changing. I would only use it as a rough estimate, I've had my MacBook say 8 and a half hours of battery remaining once.
 
The processor was probably at about 99-100% idle at the time it said 7 hrs remaining. Take a look at what it says when your actually using it and see what it says, that's way more accurate.

I've had mine with the stock HDD say 7:30 remaining before.
 
You wish it was really 7 hours. I would love to have a battery that lasted that long. But 5 hours is still pretty good. I agree that the battery status is not always accurate.
 
OP, that meter isn't exactly accurate at the START of the battery use.

Its a dynamic gauge of battery charge remaining. If you let the computer just sit, sure, 7 hours. Use it, see how that goes ;)
 
using mine at just less than half screen brightness with bluetooth off and wifi on i get about 5 hours. i think i could possibly get 5.5 with a ssd
 
4-5 hours is MORE THAN ENOUGH for me, coming from good ole PC laptops with 1.5 hours strong!! :cool:
 
That 1000 hour battery life screenshot is awesome. Imagine how much that would rock if it existed, hah!

Well I just did two battery drain tests from full charge to when it turned off. First time I was a hair short of 6 hours and the second time I squeaked by 6 hours and a few minutes. Before the SSD I'd get around 4.5 to 5 hours of battery as the power seemed to fluctuate a lot more with the HD. With the SSD it's very constant and stable from charge to charge.

So that's an improvement of about 1 to 1.5 hours of battery life which is amazing. Not to mention booting now takes exactly 23.3 seconds from when I hit the button or 18.9 seconds from the Apple start up sound. It was an expensive upgrade and not sure if it was worth the money, but I'm a sucker for impulse buys.

Here's the shots I took from the second battery drain. As the percentage goes down the readings get more and more accurate. Took it at 100, 75, 50, and 25 percent roughly. This was with everything on. I could probably push this thing to 7 hours if I turned the wifi and the bluetooth off but that's not too realistic of average use - unless all you were doing was typing an essay or something.
 

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I just replaced my original 80GB 5400 drive with a Hitachi 320 7200rpm and I noticed my battery meter jumped considerably as well.

Although not accurate I'm sure, I wonder if the jump is due to the new drive being more efficient. This might be an added plus to upgrading your hard drive.
 
sam10685 said:
I wasn't going to get the SSD but now I might. Is it noticeably faster?
Click to expand...

Yes it is noticeably faster in that I notice that it is faster. BUT, I was pretty happy with my old hard drive and didn't find even the 5400 rpm on it to be that slow. The big difference though is that any situation where I had to wait a few seconds for things to load or write to the disk are now done instantly such as program start ups. Big web pages load faster now too. Bootup and shutdowns are also noticeably quicker. Those are the things that you will notice right away.

Could I live without this? Yes. If I had to rethink this, would I buy it again? Honestly, no, because I can live without it and there's better things I could have done with the money. But having made the impulse buy already, am I happy with it? Yes since the speed, the lack of noise, and the amazing power consumption are impressive. BUT, if I held off for a few more months I'm sure this will get cheaper as the newer, larger SSD drives come out and push prices down.

You can check out this other thread here where benchmarks were posted. It gets roughly 80 MB/sec writes and 110 MB/sec reads. That's even faster than the manufacturer's conservative specs. So it would rock for big video and audio work for sure.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/652103/
 
That number is a calculation based on your current usage. Sometimes when calculating time it can go way off. This is one of those times. To get an actual read, let your MacBook work on your normal usage for 15 min and then take a look at the clock.
 
tubbymac said:
That 1000 hour battery life screenshot is awesome. Imagine how much that would rock if it existed, hah!

Well I just did two battery drain tests from full charge to when it turned off. First time I was a hair short of 6 hours and the second time I squeaked by 6 hours and a few minutes. Before the SSD I'd get around 4.5 to 5 hours of battery as the power seemed to fluctuate a lot more with the HD. With the SSD it's very constant and stable from charge to charge.

So that's an improvement of about 1 to 1.5 hours of battery life which is amazing. Not to mention booting now takes exactly 23.3 seconds from when I hit the button or 18.9 seconds from the Apple start up sound. It was an expensive upgrade and not sure if it was worth the money, but I'm a sucker for impulse buys.

Here's the shots I took from the second battery drain. As the percentage goes down the readings get more and more accurate. Took it at 100, 75, 50, and 25 percent roughly. This was with everything on. I could probably push this thing to 7 hours if I turned the wifi and the bluetooth off but that's not too realistic of average use - unless all you were doing was typing an essay or something.
Click to expand...

hmm 23.3 seconds... not that much better than my alum 2.4ghz with the WD scorpio black. I timed it and consistently got between 25-28 seconds.

ive heard of some people getting 10 seconds with SSD, if this is true then i would definitely get one.
 
elfxmilhouse said:
ive heard of some people getting 10 seconds with SSD, if this is true then i would definitely get one.
Click to expand...

Those people are lying or exaggerating beyond belief. It takes almost 5 full seconds just for the BIOS/EFI to boot and get to the Apple start up sound. That means there would be only about 5 seconds left after that for the SSD to do everything it needs to get OSX loaded. Anybody saying 10 seconds has failed kindergarden and doesn't know how to count.

These SSD drives are faster, but they aren't THAT much faster on a bootup than a good 7200 rpm hard drive.
 
chevychase said:
I just replaced my original 80GB 5400 drive with a Hitachi 320 7200rpm and I noticed my battery meter jumped considerably as well.

Although not accurate I'm sure, I wonder if the jump is due to the new drive being more efficient. This might be an added plus to upgrading your hard drive.
Click to expand...

it is very strange,I have always heard that 7200rpms hdds take a lot more of power...making the battery drain faster..:confused:
 
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