Battery life challenge: 1xHDD versus 2xSSD

[miata]

Which would provide better battery life?

I'm interested in the theory, but more interested in practice. Let's assume a Mid 2010 MBP 13" 2.66 GHz. 8 GB RAM with:

250GB 2.5" Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B 5400RPM SATA 9.5mm Notebook Drive 8MB Cache

Versus

2 x 120GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD 2.5" Serial-ATA 9.5mm Solid State Drive. (RAID 0 via Disk Utilities)

Mixed workloads of Mail, PowerPoint, Excel, Acrobat, Camino, etc.

 

[alust2013]

The single HDD will easily provide more battery life. SSDs aren't much more power efficient, they use more CPU than HDDs, and using a software RAID uses even more CPU than that, reducing battery life further.

 

[miata]

The single HDD will easily provide more battery life. SSDs aren't much more power efficient, they use more CPU than HDDs, and using a software RAID uses even more CPU than that, reducing battery life further.

Are you saying that an SSD would use more CPU than an HDD even without software RAID? Why is that?

 

[zachsternelson]

Are you saying that an SSD would use more CPU than an HDD even without software RAID? Why is that?

1 SSD would use more power than 1 HD. They are not very power friendly, on top of that they use more CPU, which also in turn, uses more power.

 

[miata]

1 SSD would use more power than 1 HD. They are not very power friendly, on top of that they use more CPU, which also in turn, uses more power.

I'm curious now. Why would one SSD require more CPU than an HDD? I though OSX accessed the SSD just as if it were an HDD.