Battery life with data doubler?

[oldskool44]

I'm curious what kind of battery life you get with a data doubler? I have a macbook late 2009, and mavericks is reporting my battery life is estimated at 3 hours, 15 minutes when I have 100% charge. I do feel that I'm really only getting about 3 hours battery life in real use (safari, opera browsing, no other apps). Is this typical? Coconut is saying the battery is 85% of design capacity and 390 charge cycles.

I wonder if removing the secondary hard drive and keeping just the ssd will give me back 5-6 hours of battery life?

 

[MCAsan]

It could be that you simply have an old battery that is nearing EOL. What does System Report say about the battery? If over 400 out of a target life of 500 cycles, I would replace the battery.

When I refurb 2010 MacBooks I replace batteries in around half.

 

[GGJstudios]

I'm curious what kind of battery life you get with a data doubler? I have a macbook late 2009, and mavericks is reporting my battery life is estimated at 3 hours, 15 minutes when I have 100% charge. I do feel that I'm really only getting about 3 hours battery life in real use (safari, opera browsing, no other apps). Is this typical? Coconut is saying the battery is 85% of design capacity and 390 charge cycles.

I wonder if removing the secondary hard drive and keeping just the ssd will give me back 5-6 hours of battery life?

Your battery life is impacted more by the workload and settings you have than by what drives you have. There are many factors that impact your battery life. See the BATTERY LIFE FROM A CHARGE section of the following link for details, including tips on how to maximize your battery life.

​

The link below should answer most, if not all, of your battery/charging questions. If you haven't already done so, I highly recommend you take the time to read it.

Apple Notebook Battery FAQ​

 

[oldskool44]

System report says the battery is normal and has a full charge capacity of 4648 mAh (the original capacity was 5450 mAh).

The only 2 background processes I'm running are magic prefs and rss notifier. Even when I completely shut those processes down, I only get about 10 mins more battery. I checked the battery faq. In activity monitor, everything that's running are apple OS services as well as iCloud photos. I set screen brightness to less than half.

The fan is running at the lowest possible rpm (2000) which makes me believe that the CPU is really not being taxed. Coconut battery reports that when running no other programs, my macbook is consuming 15 W of power. With safari running on websites without flash or video, I consume 20W. And with a netflix movie running, my mac consumes 25 W. Given that the original capacity was 50 WHr, and probably the current capacity is close to 45 WHr, I could only hope to get ~3 hrs with no programs open, and a little over 2 hrs with safari running.

That all makes me think that my mac would have to be using 10 W or less power to reach the advertised 5-6 hours battery life (that I used to actually get when i had snow leopard and a single hdd). That leads me to believe the data double (ssd+hdd) is consuming significant power.

I recently don't have to use my mac for research/work anymore, and I don't need to have a second hard drive anymore. So I am thinking to take out the data doubler and put the superdrive back in. So if anyone knows their power drain with a single hdd or with a data doubler, i would be interested in knowing what numbers they are getting.

Thanks!

 

[oldskool44]

After uninstalling magic prefs and rss notifier, battery life is improved to 4.5 - 5 hours with safari running. I even saw 6 hours at one point. If I open finder, the battery life drops for awhile.

Idle state power consumption is 8-10 watts, and with safari around 15 W. Still, there is a lot of heat generated where the data doubler is. I'm still thinking to remove it to save a few watts, although I don't know what the normal power consumption is for the macbook plastics.