Solid State Drives (SSD) Reduce Battery Life?
Tom's Hardware publishes some interesting conclusions based on their testing of Solid State Drives (SSD) in laptops. They report that contrary to popular belief, SSD drives actually reduce the battery life in laptops as compared to traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDD). They try to explain this difference by theorizing that traditional hard drives rarely reach peak power consumption and are typically in a low power state. SSDs, however, are only "active or idle" without any additional power saving mechanisms.
Tom's Hardware seems confident in their results and compared four different Flash SSD drives to a traditional hard drive. The results either showed no change in battery life or up to one hour (14%) less battery life for the test system (Dell Latitude D630). Testing was performed using the MobileMark 2007 benchmark which specifically measures battery life performance under "real world" usage. Despite the worse battery times, the SSD drives did outperform the traditional hard drive by a significant margin.
The only Mac which currently ships with a Solid State Drive option is the MacBook Air. Battery benchmarks for the MacBook Air showed modest gains vs no gains depending on the reviewer. It has been widely expected that Solid State Drives will become more available as prices on Flash memory drops. Besides improvements in performance, SSDs are also believed to be less prone to data loss.
Popular Stories
Following over three months of beta testing, iOS 18 was finally widely released to the public on Monday, September 16. The update is available in the Settings app under General → Software Update on the iPhone XS and newer. Below, we have highlighted eight key new features included in iOS 18, and Apple shared a complete list of new features and changes last week. Note that Apple...
It's that time of year again. Apple is about to release iOS 18, which promises to bring a range of new features and improvements to iPhones worldwide. It's Apple's biggest software update of the year, and the company is expected to release it sometime today – Monday, September 16. Based on past releases, the update is likely to drop at around 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time/1:00 p.m. Eastern...
Apple will likely hold another event in October this year to announce new Macs and iPads. If so, it would be the fourth time in the last five years that Apple has held an event in October. Last year, Apple held a virtual event on Monday, October 30 to announce new MacBook Pro and iMac models with the M3 series of chips. In his Power On newsletter today, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reiterated...
Apple has seemingly leaked the rumored next-generation Mac mini with five USB-C ports, according to a code change within Apple software that was discovered today by MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris. The code refers to an unreleased Mac mini model with an Apple silicon chip and five ports, which lines up with a previous report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman that said the next Mac mini will be ...
Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo today said demand for the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max has been "lower than expected" since the devices became available to pre-order in the U.S. and dozens of other countries on Friday. Kuo said his data is based on a "supply chain survey" and shipping estimates listed on Apple's online store. Kuo estimated that sales of all four iPhone 16 models reached...
Apple's iPhone development roadmap runs several years into the future and the company is continually working with suppliers on several successive iPhone models simultaneously, which is why we sometimes get rumored feature leaks so far ahead of launch. The iPhone 17 series is no different – already we have some idea of what to expect from Apple's 2025 smartphone lineup. If you plan to skip...
