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Laptop HDD power draw

I

Insomniator

Diamond Member
I see these benchmarks everywhere, the power draw of hard drives. SSD vs HDD, different brands, sizes etc... its like 1 watt vs 2 watts. On forums people are worried about a 'high power draw' of 3 watts. Oh no!

What kind of real world difference on battery life does this actually have? Is it significant or is it like 5 minutes?
 
This is something you can solve with math. First, you need an estimate of the average laptop battery size and battery life. Let's go with the Surface Pro 4, ~40 Watt-hour battery, 8 hour browsing battery life. So it draws 5 W/h, on average. 1 extra W/h would make the battery life an hour and 20 minutes shorter. 3 would make it only last 5 hours.

Some laptops have bigger batteries - I've seen up to about 100 Watt-hour. Some laptops also use more power for things other than drives. But, clearly, it matters.

Edit: Most modern SSDs are in the tenths to hundredths of a Watt range. Makes much less difference.
 
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