So I have chosen to get the new Corsair Force Series GS 360GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive for my 2012 MBP (Non-Retina), the only thing I am worried about is the power consumption. Just like Corsairs GT models, this drive uses a max of 4.7 watts. Standard HDD use 2.5. That's almost double! Will it cut my battery life in half? I am not looking for suggestions of intel SSD's, or OCZ, or even Samsung. I just want tips to improve battery life with this SSD. Note: I am also getting Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2 x 8G) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Laptop Memory. I can't wait to install these. If I need I will get one of the external battery kits.
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SSD Power Consumption
- Thread starter Silverrune
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Will it cut your battery in life in half - are you serious? Do you think that the only power consumer in a computer is a hard drive? 4.7W is a small fraction of the overall power consumption.
Anyway, the SSD has several times faster read/write speeds, which means it draws power for a smaller period of time, so will counteract the extra power required to perform an action.
Anyway, the SSD has several times faster read/write speeds, which means it draws power for a smaller period of time, so will counteract the extra power required to perform an action.
Having previously used a traditional hard drive in this laptop and now using a Corsair Force GT, I haven't really seen any real changes to battery life. It's very slightly better if anything. If you're finding that a new SSD sucks power then you could have a defective one, since there's no real reason why it would.
Some SSDs consume more power than other SSDs. The performance ones that do 500MB/S incompressible data for example will use more. I wouldn't worry too much about load power, even if it uses double the power, it'll complete a task in a fraction of the time. I'm more concerned about idle power. Some of the performance SSDs use more power than a standard notebook hard drive in idle. I have an OCZ Agility 3, it's still fast despite only doing 160MB/second, but it uses only 0.5W idle. But really, you're just talking about gaining or losing 30 minutes of battery life as it is not a significant source of power draw compared to the CPU/GPU and LED display.