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mba 2015- samsung vs samsung vs WD black- battery

M

mba2015

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 2, 2020
21
6
Good day.
I am new to the forum-Hi!
English is not my native language - so be understanding please ;)

I have Macbook Air 2015 8GB of RAM, 128GB SSD; Catalina system 10.15.4
I changed the SSD (3m ago) to a bigger one (black adapter, "full length"), samsung evo 970 drive (it works longer than 970 plus about which below);
Everything works ok, but I have objections to the length of work on battery power - I would like to extend the battery life (work and sleep mode);
Maybe someone will be interested - I had the opportunity to do some tests;
Factory disk 128GB-samsung mz-jpv128s
Samsung 970 evo 500GB
Samsung 970 evo plus 500GB
times:
on the original ssd: 10% battery consumption = 60 minutes of operation
Samsung 970 evo: 10% battery consumption = 45 minutes of work
Samsung 970 evo plus: 10% battery consumption = 38 minutes of use
tested for several days and results repeated;
Samsung 970 Evo - the version without plus - works noticeably longer.
I would also like to reduce power consumption during sleep - and now the question is whether the WD black sn750 drive will allow a longer one - according to tests found https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/upgrading-2013-2014-macbook-pro-ssd-to- m-2-nvme.2034976 / WD drive has better "energy" parameters but how will it really be?
what are your observations? Has anyone done any tests?
Is there any sens in changing the drive to WD?
greetings!
 
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The read and write speed of the Samsung drives is very high but it's limited by the speed of the PCIe 2.0 bus in the Air. Also, samsung drives are known to use more battery power and run warmer than other nvme drives.

No nvme drive will get battery life that is as good as an original Apple drive because masOS doesn't support nvme power management.

Hibernatemode=25 will reduce battery drain during sleep because the MacBook enters deep sleep where the ram content is written to a page file and the MacBook powers itself off.

The first nvme drive I used in an early 2015 13" Air was an Intel 660p. It wasn't the fastest drive so it performed about 10% worse than an original Apple SSD.
 
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Hello. thank You for the information - they are known to me, that's why my questions about the drive, e.g. WD, which theoretically has better energy parameters. I wanted to change the disk due to the insufficient capacity of 120GB, because when it came to speed it was sufficient (transfers above 1200 if I remember correctly) so the differences not noticeable in everyday work vs evo 970.
Hibernate is not the best idea for ssd drives.
 
Any reason that hibernate isn't the best for an SSD? I've never heard this before.

Many people get different results for battery life due to different usage patterns, age of the battery, etc.

People have had good results with the Adata 8200 Pro. Other people are fine with their Samsung 970 drives too.
 
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Audit13 said:
Any reason that hibernate isn't the best for an SSD? I've never heard this before.

Many people get different results for battery life due to different usage patterns, age of the battery, etc.

People have had good results with the Adata 8200 Pro. Other people are fine with their Samsung 970 drives too.
Click to expand...
„Disabling hibernate is a useful step due to the limited write cycles that SSDs are capable of. As hibernation is actually a power saving technique designed around mechanical HDDs, it is unnecessary on SSDs since they require far less power and are significantly more efficient”.
I know that for today's ssd the number of cycles is not a big problem but if you can do something to make these cycles less then why not? Hibernate is also a waste of space; I ignore the fact that -restarting the computer is currently similar to restoring from hibernation; summarizing hibernation today is not very effective for me.
 
I'm not sure where you got the quote but I have always used hibernation and will continue to do so.

Hibernation will use less power which why is I use it. I'm not concerned about write cycles because the price of SSD technology drops over the long term.

I wish you luck in your search for a Samsung replacement.
 
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Audit13 said:
I'm not sure where you got the quote but I have always used hibernation and we'll continue to do so.

Hibernation will use less power which is I use it. I'm not concerned about write cycles because the price of SSD technology drops over the long term.

I wish you luck in your search for a Samsung replacement.
Click to expand...
Thank You. I will try with WD, I'll let you know after tests.
 
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Hello after a break. I did the disk tests - wd sn750. As a reminder - the test platform is MBA 2015 8GB. The factory ssd drive had a capacity of 128GB (Samsung). The WD drive, unfortunately, does not provide better battery life - i.e. during operation, the average times are about 10% of battery consumption for every 37minutes of work - so it falls out of the Samsung Evo 970, which I wanted to replace; so working times in wd are similar to samsung 970 evo plus. The only positive difference in the WD drive is the power consumption during sleep - for 9 hours of sleep it consumed about 5% of the battery (similar to evo PLUS). Finally, more important for me is the working time during normal work than a longer sleep time, so I will not decide to replace the Samsung disk with a WD disk. One more thing - during testing the computer with the wd disk had crashes when returning from sleep - the computer had to restart; in the system logs there was information about an error when resuming work; I have not experienced this situation with samsung drives.
 
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So based on your testing the Samsung 970 Evo works noticeably longer. This is good to know. I'm currently using a 970PRO on my 11inch MacBook AIR but plan to get another NVMe M.2 storage drive for my 2015 MacBook Pro Retina so based on your tests will most likely source a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo drive. Thanks for posting your observations!
 
JDW said:
There is much more to be said on that subject. Specifically, this Kernel Extension FIX is available on Github. Also, OWC talks about their NVMe Power Management here.
Click to expand...
I have yet to see any mention that the NVMe drives can match the Apple SSD in terms of thermals and battery run time while running macOS.

The Anandtech article goes on to say:

The OWC Aura Pro X2 is the first drive we've subjected to our updated idle power measurement test that seems to have a compatibility problem. The active idle and desktop idle numbers are in line with expectations and are comparable to other SM2262EN drives. When the lowest power PCIe ASPM features are enabled, the Aura Pro X2 is no longer able to stay at a low power level and instead jumps up to almost half its active idle. This might be a side effect of the adapter we're using to get the drive working with standard M.2 slots.

The Apple SSD uses AHCI instead of NVMe, and none of the usual settings for manipulating power levels for SATA or PCIe drives seem to be of any use. Its active idle power draw is far higher than NVMe drives with modern controllers, and turning PCIe ASPM on makes it draw even more power. Apple almost certainly has non-standard ways to put this drive into a properly low-power state, but we aren't able to achieve this on our desktop testbed that is equipped to measure idle power.
 
Audit13 said:
I have yet to see any mention that the NVMe drives can match the Apple SSD in terms of thermals and battery run time while running macOS.

The Anandtech article goes on to say:
Click to expand...

While I certainly appreciate that info, that article says nothing of the Kernel Extension Fix. It also does not appear you have tried it either. As such, neither one of us can say whether it really works well or not, as I myself have not yet purchased an NVMe upgrade for my mid-2015 15" MBP (which currently has a 1TB SSD). Thanks
 
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The article does say that
JDW said:
While I certainly appreciate that info, that article says nothing of the Kernel Extension Fix. It also does not appear you have tried it either. As such, neither one of us can say whether it really works well or not, as I myself have not yet purchased an NVMe upgrade for my mid-2015 15" MBP (which currently has a 1TB SSD). Thanks
Click to expand...
I had an early 2015 13" Air with an Intel 660p. It was running Catalina with all the patches and the extension didn't improve my Air's battery life that I could tell. I decided to go back to my 256 ssuax for now.

I hope you have better luck than me with your upgrade.
 
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Audit13 said:
The article does say that

I had an early 2015 13" Air with an Intel 660p. It was running Catalina with all the patches and the extension didn't improve my Air's battery life that I could tell. I decided to go back to my 256 ssuax for now.

I hope you have better luck than me with your upgrade.
Click to expand...

Thank you for clarifying that you actually did install and fully test the GitHub Kernel Extension and found that it did not work at all on your 2015 MB Air with Intel 660p SSD. This means the extension may or may not work on newer model Airs or the MBP, and perhaps if the NVMe is another brand, such as the WD Black.
 
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JDW said:
Thank you for clarifying that you actually did install and fully test the GitHub Kernel Extension and found that it did not work at all on your 2015 MB Air with Intel 660p SSD. This means the extension may or may not work on newer model Airs or the MBP, and perhaps if the NVMe is another brand, such as the WD Black.
Click to expand...
Hopefully, your results are better than mine.

I chose the Intel 660p because it was cheap and seemed to be a good choice for battery life among the other NVMe drives available and the Air only has PCIe 2.0. High performance drives will have their read and write speeds limited by the bus.

I lost about 15% in battery life which isn't too bad but, since I had a spare 256 GB Apple drive, I used it to replace the Intel.
 
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