SSD Installed and Less Battery time?

[TheGreatSatan]

When I had a regular hard drive installed and let's say 80% left of my battery, it would say I have a good 3 hours left. Now that I installed a 120GB SSD, that uses less power than a regular hard drive, it says I have an hour left at 80%. All my drivers are showing as installed, even the drop sensor that my SSD doesn't need to worry about. I have my power management set to balanced and usually have my screen brightness on the lowest level.

[diluzio91]

When I had a regular hard drive installed and let's say 80% left of my battery, it would say I have a good 3 hours left. Now that I installed a 120GB SSD, that uses less power than a regular hard drive, it says I have an hour left at 80%. All my drivers are showing as installed, even the drop sensor that my SSD doesn't need to worry about. I have my power management set to balanced and usually have my screen brightness on the lowest level.

Did you test the time out? if you're dissatisfied with the ssd you can send me a pm and ill give you my shipping address. :D:D:D

also, had you reinstalled the OS before you switched the HDD out, because the dell factory image is different from the recovery disk in a few ways

[OvRiDe]

I believe that this has been an issue for ssd's for a while.

Tom's Hardware did a test a few years ago that concluded that you get less battery life with an SSD then a traditional HDD. They did come back and say their testing was flawed and they retested with better but not far off results. I think it has something to do with the Sata II controller, but now the manufacturers are using a better flash to SATA bridge.

[Lothair]

Are you actually losing two hours in real world time or is it just saying as much?

I can't imagine it to be possible to lose 2/3rds (2 Hours) of your battery life from installing an SSD.

[TheGreatSatan]

Apparently SSD's draw the same amount of power no matter what you're doing. Traditional hard drives spin down when not being accessed and thus use less power. The battery loss sucks, but it's still worth it.

[mDust]

Apparently SSD's draw the same amount of power no matter what you're doing. Traditional hard drives spin down when not being accessed and thus use less power. The battery loss sucks, but it's still worth it.

Most SSDs I've seen consume <.5W idle and around 2-3W reading/writing. Honestly, a notebook style HDD shouldn't use much more power, however, the performance:power ratio definitely favors the SSD...as long as the notebook isn't limited with a SATA I controller.

[zinadinpeterson]

It feels good setup considering that you do not want to write as much as possible on the SSD hard drive. SSD have a shorter life, as measured by the number of disk writes.I think that an average of 10,000 write a SSD, but you have to check. This will improve enough to buy a replacement, or 3 years should not be too expensive.

[dr.walrus]

SSD have a shorter life, as measured by the number of disk writes.I think that an average of 10,000 write a SSD, but you have to check. This will improve enough to buy a replacement, or 3 years should not be too expensive.

This is and always has been a load of rubbish - the figure is usually well over ten times that - and that's each and every storage bit. Personally, I don't overwrite my OS and application data more than maybe a dozen times - this sort of figure only has any merit if the data in those areas is always being overwritten.

Even if we do accept the 10000 writes, 3 years figure, that means about 1000 days, 10 writes per sector per day across the drive, you'd have to be formatting and replacing ALL the data on the drive five times a day. Nothing sees that traffic apart from enterprise backup.

In reality, this is what you have floating around these days is drives quoting stats like these:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-068-OC&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910
2000000hr MTBF is a few hundred years - and the warranty alone is 3 years...

[DrkSide]

+1 Dr.walrus

TheGreatSatan - have you done any tests to actually see how long you get out of the battery. I am interested because I am thinking of buying one for my laptop. Already have one for the desktop and I do agree that it is the best upgrade you can buy (if all of your other hardware is up to snuff)

However with the steam sale over Christmas I am about to pick up a platter just for my steam folder.

[TheGreatSatan]

So, my battery has been getting worse. I still don't know if it was caused by getting a new SSD or just bad timing. I called Alienware and they sent me a new battery (still under warranty). With the new battery installed and at 95% it says I have 7 hours left. So apparently, it's back to normal. We'll just have to see how long that stays the same.

[Lothair]

That battery is worth it's weight in gold if the charge goes up! SELL SELL SELL! lol

It sounds like a software issue, unless you're supposed to be getting those numbers? I'd time it against a clock and see if it matches up.

[TheGreatSatan]

I was getting almost 6 hours when I had a 5400 rpm drive installed and then suddenly after I put in my SSD, my charge time dropped to 3 hours!!

[Oneslowz28]

Depending on how much the SSD is in use, I could see it draining a battery. Do you just have the OS on the SSD or is it your main drive?

[TheGreatSatan]

It's my only drive. So, everything is on it.

I already know that it drains faster than a normal hard drive. SSD's pull the same amount of power all the time. Normal hard drives spin up then down and use less power. I just wonder what a laptop battery is designed to handle. Are they built for peaks and lows in power consumption? Or a constant draw at the same rate?

[Oneslowz28]

Well all batteries are designed for a constant current draw rate. This is how manufacturers rate their mAh. The reason no battery gives you the charge time and lifespan they are rated for is fluctuations in the current draw. Its a little more complicated than that but that's the jist of it.

[mDust]

It's my only drive. So, everything is on it.

I already know that it drains faster than a normal hard drive. SSD's pull the same amount of power all the time. Normal hard drives spin up then down and use less power. I just wonder what a laptop battery is designed to handle. Are they built for peaks and lows in power consumption? Or a constant draw at the same rate?

SSDs do not pull the same amount of power all the time. They have an active and an idle power draw measurement on every SSD that is sold. Generally it's about 3-4 watts seek and <1 watt idle. However, that isn't much different than a lot of notebook drives. The difference is that SSDs don't have to spin up a disk...they just spit the data out and then instantly idle again. So the HDDs spend longer using slightly more power which is why the SSDs are suppose to be more power efficient.
Your laptop battery is designed to output a certain amount of amps at certain voltages for a certain number of hours...this is measured in milli-watt-hours. The three measures (amps, volts, and time) are all dependent on each other. As output watts (amps x volts) increase, the battery life (time) decreases as it's inversely proportional. If you want longer battery life, the milliwatts have to decrease. If you have HWMonitor installed, you can watch your battery drain in real-time by the numbers. It's fun.:)

[Konrad]

Disable *all* search indexing on the system drive. You lose the benefits of "fast" searches, you gain 10-20% more usable drive capacity. You also gain maybe 50% more battery life because the drive isn't constantly clicking and indexing itself in the background, you also don't have to defrag as often ... I don't know how much of a difference it makes with an SSD.

[mDust]

Disable *all* search indexing on the system drive. You lose the benefits of "fast" searches, you gain 10-20% more usable drive capacity. You also gain maybe 50% more battery life because the drive isn't constantly clicking and indexing itself in the background, you also don't have to defrag as often ... I don't know how much of a difference it makes with an SSD.

That's a good idea except for defragging an SSD. SSDs don't ever need to be defragged and shouldn't be, as it destroys them.

[Konrad]

lol, I should've worded it better. I routinely disable indexing on my laptops with wonderful results. Battery life does increase by a large margin because far less power gets constantly drained by "idle" moving parts.

But I've never used a mobile machine with SSD; I'm not sure if my "tweak" makes any noteworthy differences on performance, longevity, or battery life with SSD components. I agree, defrag isn't necessary on SSD volumes (unless maybe you're preparing for emergency data recovery) and it seems like it would be detrimental in the long term. I'm still leery of the "limited" life of SSD technologies. (Yes, I know SSDs have huge performance gains and are already used in critical enterprise applications ... I'll probably resist until SSD prices and lifespans reach parity with HDD technologies.)

[TheGreatSatan]

I already had that off, but I did just shut off XPS Services because I never print from my lappy. I also disabled Windows Media Center and DVD Maker because I don't use those either. Then I killed all Windows Games. Does anyone know what XPS Viewer is?

[crenn]

XPS Viewer is able to view the XPS documents. I commonly print to XPS instead of paper so I have a digital copy.

[Konrad]

Yeah ^

The idea is for people who haven't purchased Office to still be able to view/print Excel documents. A similar piece of freebie junksoft does the same for Word documents, they tend to travel as a pair.

I hope by "disabled" you mean you've uninstalled those components entirely. Gain small performance/capacity, lose nothing (assuming you have the CABs/recovery stuff, lol).

You can get some battery gains by locking up your firewall so it's not constantly draining power into transmitting WiFi confirmations for every single damned packet it receives. The price of BlueTooth convenience is big power suck into radio signals. Wires have definite advantage, if you don't mind tripping on them.

After the mechanical HDD and radio transmissions the only big powersucking offender is the display. You can turn your brightness and response down but obviously trade off against crappy display quality. Old LCD "text-on-black" style themes/wallpapers will save some of your battery power (maybe even a lot, if your display is set at full awesomeness), but IMHO they look uglier than animal sin and aren't worth the pain.

[crenn]

XPS isn't for excel documents, it's a format trying to compete against PDF.

[Konrad]

Oops, I was wrong about XPS.

Another format? Fortunately there's XPS-to-PDF converters out there.

On that note, I recommend PDF SpeedUp (http://www.acropdf.com/). There was once a time when different PDF reader softwares (like Foxit) were lightweight and speedy, but they seem to have become so bloated down with useless crap that they're no longer any better than the Adobe Reader.

[TheGreatSatan]

I don't mind Adobe as long as it's not in MSConFig. I don't get why it thinks it needs to load at startup

[Konrad]

Nothing loads at startup over here, nor launches processes, hides in the background, attempts to call the mothership, munches on cookies, autoupdates, autoloads components, steals cursor/mouse focus, writes data where it doesn't belong, changes system settings, or has any idea what's happening ... not unless I personally configure it first. I'm not averse to hacking and butchering whatever it takes to keep things running rakish. I'm really quite paranoid about it, actually. Intelligent manual control beats Microsoft's stupid WUA automated "superadmin" crap any day. All of my software languishes in a state of complete sensory deprivation until I decide to play with it.