SSD and Battery Life

[Pghpooh]

I have a Dell Studio XPS1640. Big screen,,, large HD,,, etc. I get about 2 1/2 hours use when on battery only.
Would there be a increase in battery life by switching to a SSD drive??? I'd love to get at least another hour or more by using a SSD.
My use is mostly internet research, some spread sheet work, and sometimes listening to music either on the hard drive or my home network.

Any thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks

 

[npaladin-2000]

You'll get a battery increase, but based on your usage patters, it probably won't be huge. Your regular hard drive is probably spinning down and idling except when you're listening to music on the local machine.

I'd guesstimate between 13 and 30 minutes extra on battery depending on which SSD you end up with. Some of them are better on power than others, and a lot depends on particular usage patterns and what battery saving settings you have in place. But I just don't see an hour's worth of gain.

 

[John Connor]

I concur, you won't get an hours worth of gain.

 

[Eug]

Depends on the SSD. The highest power SSD have WORSE power characteristics than even some platter drives.

Most of the newer consumer-oriented SSDs are decent, with very specific ones having excellent power characteristics.

My point is you can't just go out and buy any SSD and assume you'll get way better power savings. Furthermore, as mentioned, it's not as if a good low power SSD will get you one hour's worth of power savings. It would probably be closer to 15 minutes I'm guessing.

 

[AzN1337c0d3r]

Mechanical HDD LOAD power consumption is on the range of 2-3W.

Even if OP had a really shitty 50 WHr battery and was hitting his drive non-stop and then replaced it with a magical zero-power-consumption SSD, he'd gain 5% battery time at best.

Given that he's getting 150 minutes of time now, that means he gains a whopping 7.5 more minutes with 100% load factor on a magical 0-power storage device.

More likely in the real world he won't even gain a single minute of additional battery life.

TL;DR: SSDs don't give you any significant additional battery life.

 

[kmmatney]

Mechanical HDD LOAD
More likely in the real world he won't even gain a single minute of additional battery life.

That has been my real-life experience switching to SSDs in laptops. If there is a battery life gain, haven't noticed it. Performance is much better, though.

 

[smakme7757]

We did a small study on this actually. Just for shits and giggles.

This was with standard 3.5" HDD and SSDs.

SSD Intel
Load - 3.7w
Idle - 0.7w

HDD - Seagate
Load - 8
Idle - 3,7

The major saving is the reduced heat from an SSD which might help with overall system temps and in turn allow a slower fan RPM in the system.

but that's about it. As mentioned above, a few minutes might be best case.

 

[npaladin-2000]

We did a small study on this actually. Just for shits and giggles.

This was with standard 3.5" HDD and SSDs.

SSD Intel
Load - 3.7w
Idle - 0.7w

HDD - Seagate
Load - 8
Idle - 3,7

The major saving is the reduced heat from an SSD which might help with overall system temps and in turn allow a slower fan RPM in the system.

but that's about it. As mentioned above, a few minutes might be best case.

It's really hard to tell because not only is idle load lower on an SSD, but depending on load, SSDs are idle for more time than HDDs. So it's also a matter of spending more time in a lower power state. But still, yeah, that's not going to get you an hour.

A lot depends on usage patterns. That's a HUGE variable.

 

[npaladin-2000]

FYI, in my own case, I took the default 5400 RPM hard drive out of my Asus Q500, and replaced it with a 512 GB OCZ Vector. Estimated battery life went from 3 hours and 6 minutes to 3 hours and 25 minutes, based on my own usage patterns, which tends to be fairly moderate on the disk accesses.

 

[greenhawk]

you probably see a better increase in battery time by checking that the cpu slows down when not being used. Setting cpu (under power settings ) to "battery" (i think it is called) instead of "balanced" or "performance".

 

[SenK9]

The gain won't really be substantial. You'd be better off finding out what apps/services are eating up your CPU time in the background, checking wifi power saving, screen brightness, sleep times, etc.

Also might be worth checking what others with the same laptop are getting, to get a realistic expectation of runtime.

 

[sub.mesa]

Depending on your laptop the gain could be about 10%. Many reviewsites test SSD power consumption without power saving technologies enabled. Typical power consumption of an SSD without power saving technology is 0,7 watts, while it drops below 0,1 watts with DIPM-power savings enabled.

Assuming your laptop runs at 7 - 10 watts idle, a reasonable figure for modern laptops, it means you have about 10% power savings or even slightly more. Testing at load is vastly different; when playing a game your laptop might consume about 25W or even more, and the power savings might be negligible.

 

[Lorne]

You can also micro manage the power managment a little more.

 

[Bill Brasky]

You can also micro manage the power managment a little more.

Setup CPU profiles in power management. This will have a significant effect on battery life.

I have a Sandy bridge i5 laptop, and I turn cpu max to 50% and graphics to low on battery. It makes a pretty huge difference. At least an hour and probably more like 2.