Maybe SSDs do save battery life after all


You may remember a story a little while back suggesting that SSDS did not in fact save battery power. Well, that really pulled the tail of the great cat “The Internet,” resulting in heavy criticism of the testers’ methods. People feel that the higher-end SSDs may have been using more power, but the tests ignored that their higher capacities meant they would do more work under that testing situation. The masses clamored for a “real-world” test.

So Laptopmag more or less provided one. They set up a laptop to load webpages every 30 seconds (no caching) and had it do that until it died with three different hard drives — two SSD, one 5400RPM HDD. The SSDs died 10 minutes later than the HDD: not a major gain, but not a loss, as Tom’s Hardware’s report would have you believe. I’d have liked to see some movie or music playing as well to exercise the things a little bit, but I’m sure that’s forthcoming in the torrent of clarifying tests every site in the world will be running in response to this little dispute.