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How Much Battery Drain from Flash Drive?

C

cshel24

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 10, 2012
75
0
I feel kind of silly asking, but hey there is no such thing as a stupid question (only stupid people)?

I got this bright idea... I only have 128gb of storage on my MBA. Which is should be enough for me. I have a tiny little flash drive (one of those the size of the ones that work w/a wireless mouse). I put my movies on the flash drive.

My question is, if I was to just leave that flash drive plugged into my MBA all the time, would it reduce my battery life by much?
 
Not enough to notice the difference in battery life, losing 5-10 mins out of 12-15 hours isn't much.

If you're going to be leaving something like that in all the time and you don't use the SD slot for anything else, why not look into something like Nifty Drive?
 
I have a Patriot Autobahn mini flash drive. I've kept it plugged in to my 2012 11" MBA for 2 solid years without a single problem. I keep my iTunes and iPhoto library stored solely on that. I only have a 64GB SSD and the flash drive is 32GB. Got 50% more storage for about $20. I've noticed very little to no battery life difference.
 
Mlrollin91 said:
I have a Patriot Autobahn mini flash drive. I've kept it plugged in to my 2012 11" MBA for 2 solid years without a single problem. I keep my iTunes and iPhoto library stored solely on that. I only have a 64GB SSD and the flash drive is 32GB. Got 50% more storage for about $20. I've noticed very little to no battery life difference.
Click to expand...

Do you eject the flash drive before you put the MBA to sleep or shut it down?
 
japasneezemonk said:
Do you eject the flash drive before you put the MBA to sleep or shut it down?
Click to expand...

I have a Transcend Jetdrive Lite 360 (64GB) half length SD card as an internal Time Machine drive and I've used USB flash memory in my Mac for years.

You shouldn't have to eject the drive before putting it to sleep or shutting it down. As long as the drive isn't pulled out while the Mac is asleep you'll be OK. As for shutting down, don't worry about it.

The only problem I've come across is when my battery is completely dead and I plug it in and then turn it back on again. OS X moans that the drive wasn't ejected properly. Each time its happened (twice so far) I've run a disk check in Disk Utility to ensure that its not got any problems with it.
 
japasneezemonk said:
Do you eject the flash drive before you put the MBA to sleep or shut it down?
Click to expand...

As pacmania1982 stated, you don't have to eject it before shunt down or sleep, just make sure you don't remove the drive while the computer is sleeping because when you wake it up you will get the warning message about possibly losing data with removing the drive without ejecting. Again, if the battery were to completely die while the USB drive is plugged in, it will force eject when it goes to sleep and when returning on you will get the same warning message.
 
I go from 10-12 hours down to 8-9 hours with a 32gb usb stick plugged in, even if it's not doing anything.
 
You have to eject the drive. Something about it being attached not allowing the Mac to go into deep sleep with the lid is closed. I tested it when I got my SD card a few months ago and it was true.

Had to install sleep watcher and program some scripts to automatically dismount/remount my SD card on sleep/wake . Once I did that it was fine, kept SD card in for about 4 months now. Don't really notice battery drain.
 
iizmoo said:
You have to eject the drive. Something about it being attached not allowing the Mac to go into deep sleep with the lid is closed. I tested it when I got my SD card a few months ago and it was true.
Click to expand...

I was more concerned with data corruption. Losing a couple of minutes of battery life isn't a big deal to me.

To your point, if the the computer never goes into deep sleep, does having a flash drive or hard drive plugged into the usb port of an iMac mean that the computer never goes into deep sleep? The couple of times that I have left flash drives and hard drives plugged into my iMac for days at a time, it appears to be going into deep sleep normally.
 
It may stop your MacBook from going into its deeper sleep state, which will effect battery.


Mac computers manufactured in 2013 or later enter standby after three hours of "regular" sleep. Earlier computers activate after just over an hour of "regular" sleep.

To enter standby, the computer must:

Be running on battery power (if it is a Mac notebook computer).
Have no USB devices attached.
Have no Thunderbolt devices attached.
Have no SD card inserted.
Have no external display attached.
Click to expand...

(quoted from
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4392 )
 
Newtons Apple said:
My MBA goes to sleep just fine with either a USB Jumpdrive or SD card installed.
Click to expand...

It will sleep fine, but it won't enter the standby mode mentioned by ManicMarc.

Regular sleep will use about 1% of the battery per hour of sleep. If you have a machine that supports standby and it enters standby sleep after three hours of regular sleep the battery can last up to 30 days in that mode.
 
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