Most power saving 2.5" SSD

[hanslplanck]

Hello,
anadtech has really great SSD reviews, its one of the fex that also measure power consumption. Unfortunately, not oall drives are included in the charts and sometimes the values of drives, contained in two graphs, is different. So its difficult to compare.
I want maximum battery life on my new laptop. I have an M.2 Nvme Drive and an open 2.5" slot. I want to use the latter for my media collection. Since my goal is max. battery life, I want to use an SSD for that.
Performance is irrelevant. It should be able to playback FullHD movies seamlessly. Thats the highest demand.
Is a DRAM-less drive the best choice? Maybe something like the Toshiba OCZ TR200?
Thanks

 

[daveybrat]

I would think quite the opposite. Without the DRAM buffer the drive has to work harder and should consume more power.

 

[Billy Tallis]

As long as your system is configured to properly use all the idle power modes, including DEVSLEEP, then any modern SATA SSD will have very low idle power. If it's not your primary drive, you probably won't be waking it up often enough for it to have much effect on battery life. If you were instead to ditch the NVMe SSD (which is probably not as efficient as a good SATA SSD), then the best choice for a SATA drive as the only storage in your machine would probably be a Samsung 860 EVO, since they're fast and have pretty low active power usage.

 

[IntelUser2000]

I want maximum battery life on my new laptop. I have an M.2 Nvme Drive and an open 2.5" slot. I want to use the latter for my media collection. Since my goal is max. battery life, I want to use an SSD for that.
Performance is irrelevant. It should be able to playback FullHD movies seamlessly. Thats the highest demand.

Your wants are difficult to meet, because battery life is a far more complex thing than looking at reviews. It's not just a matter of looking at idle and load power consumption. Available power management states, the speed it transitions into each power state, the level of optimization on the drivers, platform specific optimizations(600p and 760p for example has optimizations on the latest mobile Intel platforms), the workload, all matter. How will a reviewer truly test all the variables? Impossible.

Single drive always uses less power than multiple, so give up either the NVMe or the 2.5" drive if you want lowest power consumption.

 

[hanslplanck]

Ok, thank you very much. I did some research in the meantime and came up with same conclusion then Billy Battery life beats performance in my case. And since it seems that most people agree on the Samsung 860 evo to be the best SATA SSD, I will get that one.

 

[hojnikb]

I would think quite the opposite. Without the DRAM buffer the drive has to work harder and should consume more power.

Not necessarily true. Having no DRAM on board means less complex controller and no need to power and refresh dram module. That alone will consume more power than SSD doing more reads (writes are done on both anyway, since ftl tables have to be updated on flash as well) for ftl tables.

 

[gpse]

I too have been looking for a battery friendly SSD for my laptop. I ended up purchasing a Samsung 860 EVO 250GB today from Amazon.

 

[hanslplanck]

I then did not. Found this test https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-860-evo-ssd-review,5446-3.html
They are the only ones I know of, that test battery runtime specifically. The 860 Evo came in last. Maybe the drivers are better now.
I got the Corsair MP300 with 500GB. Thats enough for me. The big brother, the MP510 was tested on anandtech and other sites. It has one of lowest m.2 power consumption in comparison. The MP300 probably has a little less. So probablya bit more performance the the 860 Evo and similar or maybe a bit less power consumption.

 

[hojnikb]

I then did not. Found this test https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-860-evo-ssd-review,5446-3.html
They are the only ones I know of, that test battery runtime specifically. The 860 Evo came in last. Maybe the drivers are better now.
I got the Corsair MP300 with 500GB. Thats enough for me. The big brother, the MP510 was tested on anandtech and other sites. It has one of lowest m.2 power consumption in comparison. The MP300 probably has a little less. So probablya bit more performance the the 860 Evo and similar or maybe a bit less power consumption.

What drivers ? SSDs don't have drivers, the only thing that can be improved here is firmware.