SSD's and Battery life

[Blue Sun]

I've been considering upgrading my MBP with a 240GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD from OWC.

Has anyone noticed a difference in battery life when switching from a standard HDD to an SSD?

Thanks guys.


Note: I have a mid-2010 2.4GHz Core i5 MBP.

 

[Hellhammer]

Although it depends on the HD and SSD, there shouldn't be a big difference.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd/7

 

[thinh3d]

from my experience, running a mid-2010 MBP with 256GB Crucial C300, the battery life is definitely better, around half an hour or something. But you have to see it for your self!

There are few things you have to do to achieve good battery life:

close all the running process that you don't need, specially the one only sitting in your menu bar and hog CPU or RAM.

quit all the apps you don't need (obvious, duh!)

and most importantly, download gfxCardStatus to run on Intel GPU only. This will save you A LOT OF BATTERY!

have fun ^^

 

[Fubar1977]

Can`t say I`ve noticed much of a difference to be honest.

 

[Blue Sun]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I've decided to go with the OWC 120GB SSD for AUD$289. I'm going to pair that with 8GB of RAM.

I'm thinking there should be a fairly big performance boost.

 

[Fubar1977]

You won`t be disappointed, it will make a noticeable difference.

 

[man02195]

from my experience, running a mid-2010 MBP with 256GB Crucial C300, the battery life is definitely better, around half an hour or something. But you have to see it for your self!

There are few things you have to do to achieve good battery life:

close all the running process that you don't need, specially the one only sitting in your menu bar and hog CPU or RAM.

quit all the apps you don't need (obvious, duh!)

and most importantly, download gfxCardStatus to run on Intel GPU only. This will save you A LOT OF BATTERY!

have fun ^^

+1
i have owc 120gb and 1tb drive in owc data doubler. i unmount hdd when not needed. probably get an extra 0:30 to 0:45 compared to running just the 1tb before. lightning fast startups, and you can start parallels whenever necessary, instead of leaving it running.

 

[GGJstudios]

Has anyone noticed a difference in battery life when switching from a standard HDD to an SSD?

Your battery life is dependent on many factors beyond just the type of drive you have, including screen brightness, WiFi, bluetooth, apps/processes/widgets running, Flash on websites, graphics-intensive applications, etc.

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

Apple Notebook Battery FAQ​

 

[karsten]

i've gotten anywhere from 30-45 more minutes of battery power with a ssd in my mpb if that helps

 

[SurferMan]

What I've always been curious of, if you did an SSD swap, how much longer does the battery last when watching movies... like I travel and can watch 2-3 movies on my 13" Pro... just curious how much more battery life I would get doing that with an ssd.

 

[Blue Sun]

Once I've installed the SSD, is there anything i should be aware of?

Changing hibernation and sleep settings for example?

 

[b-dogg]

Once I've installed the SSD, is there anything i should be aware of?

For the record SSD is the best performance upgrade I've made - better than the 8Gb of ram I installed.

Changing hibernation and sleep settings for example?

Yes, change you second drive HDD to sleep after 3mins. Mine just houses my media and it was spinning when I didn't need it. Drained the batter a lot quicker:

sudo pmset -g to view your current settings

sudo pmset -b disksleep 3
sudo pmset -c disksleep 0

-a = all (batt/power)
-b = battery only
-c = charger plugged in
x = no. of minutes.
0 = off

 

[tjb1]

Once I've installed the SSD, is there anything i should be aware of?

Changing hibernation and sleep settings for example?

If your drive is running 343 you will need to set hibernation mode

sudo pmset -a hibernationmode 0

Turns it off so it doesn't dump ram into the hdd, will save you 8gb of ssd space. Only thing is if you lose power, you can't recover from where you left off because it only keeps the memory in the ram so a power loss clears the ram.

Anyway...you may notice a problem with the 343 anyway and may need to flash it to 310 firmware.

 

[thinh3d]

If your drive is running 343 you will need to set hibernation mode

sudo pmset -a hibernationmode 0

Turns it off so it doesn't dump ram into the hdd, will save you 8gb of ssd space. Only thing is if you lose power, you can't recover from where you left off because it only keeps the memory in the ram so a power loss clears the ram.

Anyway...you may notice a problem with the 343 anyway and may need to flash it to 310 firmware.

may I ask what 343 and 310 means?

 

[WardC]

may I ask what 343 and 310 means?

He's referring to the OWC drive firmware revision. The 343 revision firmware on the OWC SSD drives has been known to cause problems when your MacBook Pro goes into automatic-sleep mode (system freezes up on wake). The 310 revision firmware has no apparent problems with automatic sleep mode.

 

[tjb1]

He's referring to the OWC drive firmware revision. The 343 revision firmware on the OWC SSD drives has been known to cause problems when your MacBook Pro goes into automatic-sleep mode (system freezes up on wake). The 310 revision firmware has no apparent problems with automatic sleep mode.

Thats a Sandforce firmware version, not OWC. Here is where it is located...

System Profiler > Serial-ATA > SSD Drive > Revision

 

[Blue Sun]

If your drive is running 343 you will need to set hibernation mode

sudo pmset -a hibernationmode 0

Turns it off so it doesn't dump ram into the hdd, will save you 8gb of ssd space. Only thing is if you lose power, you can't recover from where you left off because it only keeps the memory in the ram so a power loss clears the ram.

Anyway...you may notice a problem with the 343 anyway and may need to flash it to 310 firmware.

Thank you very much for the info.

I believe that OWC doesn't have a Mac OSX firmware updater. Is it possible to flash the SSD using a bootcamp partition that is stored on the actual drive being updated?