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.

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/showpr...=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.