• Joel Nichols
• Jul 2,2008
• In: Featured, Technology

Solid State Drives Reduce Battery Life?

A report from Tom’s Hardware states that solid state drives actually reduce battery life. They report that this is likely due to the fact that harddrives in laptops are often in a power saving state, unless some intensive work is being done. However, SSDs are either on or off. This means that no matter how much or little work being done, it will still use the same amount of power.

Tom’s Hardware seems to be confident with their findings, and they have tested their theory with 4 different solid state drives. They checked the battery life of the solid state drives and a normal harddrive and they found that they either had no change in battery life or up to 1 hour less with the solid state drive on their test system, a Dell Latitude. They performed this benchmark with MobileMark, which is specifically designed to measure battery life under ‘real world’ usage.

Of course, while solid state drives definitely do seem to use a lot more battery life, it should be noted that they still have big performance increases from normal harddrives. Also, as the price of solid state drives drops, they will likely become a lot more common.