Battery life with SSD

[mpaquette]

My battery life seems to have taken a hit since I installed a Samsung 830 SSD. In other words, the time to go from 100% charged down to say 5% seems to be happening much more quickly since I replaced the stock HDD with the Samsung SSD. Anyone else notice this?

 

[maflynn]

My battery life has not really changed dramatically since adding a SSD

 

[daneoni]

^
Ditto

 

[GermanyChris]

With the Agility 3 battery life improved..with the Vertex 2 it decreased noticeably

 

[XandeR803]

It definitely depends on the ssd. With the vertex 3 I noticed a slight drop in battery life compared to the stock HD but with the intel 320 I've gained about 30-60 min depending on the work load.

 

[kobyh15]

I have the 320. Probably gained about 30 to an hour.

 

[kkdart]

Question

My battery life seems to have taken a hit since I installed a Samsung 830 SSD. In other words, the time to go from 100% charged down to say 5% seems to be happening much more quickly since I replaced the stock HDD with the Samsung SSD. Anyone else notice this?

I though since a ssd didn't have any moving parts it wouldn't use more energy...
Are your running lion/ have trimm support?

Have you check the amount of writting done on the ssd when idle and under load?

 

[GGJstudios]

My battery life seems to have taken a hit since I installed a Samsung 830 SSD. In other words, the time to go from 100% charged down to say 5% seems to be happening much more quickly since I replaced the stock HDD with the Samsung SSD. Anyone else notice this?

Check to see if Spotlight is indexing by looking at the Menu Bar icon:

(not indexing)

(indexing)

Also, some of this may help: Performance Tips For Mac OS X

There are many factors that impact your battery life. See the BATTERY LIFE FROM A CHARGE section of the following link for details.

This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:

Apple Notebook Battery FAQ​

 

[VTMac]

I though since a ssd didn't have any moving parts it wouldn't use more energy...

This is a popular misconception. Writing flash memory can be very power hungry depending on the type of chips used. Anandtech.com have good write ups in which they measure power consumption against ssds and hdds. Long story short, if you are getting an ssd to gain battery life you generally need to stay away from the highest performance ssds. They pretty much all result in less battery life.

 

[mpaquette]

This is a popular misconception. Writing flash memory can be very power hungry depending on the type of chips used. Anandtech.com have good write ups in which they measure power consumption against ssds and hdds. Long story short, if you are getting an ssd to gain battery life you generally need to stay away from the highest performance ssds. They pretty much all result in less battery life.

My Samsung 830 shows a "Negotiated Link Speed" of 6 Gigabit, where the stock hard drive was only 3. I wonder if this has something to do with the shorter battery life?

 

[VTMac]

My Samsung 830 shows a "Negotiated Link Speed" of 6 Gigabit, where the stock hard drive was only 3. I wonder if this has something to do with the shorter battery life?

Not really. Battery life largely is a function of synchronous nand vs asynchronous nand and how aggressive the garbage collection algorithms are. If you really want to know you can go to www.anandtech.com and read their review for your particular SSD. They compare all SSDs they review to other SSDs as well as conventional hard drives for power consumption. Certain SSDs will really improve battery life, and others (I'm looking at you OCZ & sandforce) will eat up the power.