Low Power Laptop Hard Drive

[mikeyp410]

I am looking for the best Low Power Hard drive for the money. Is SSD the way to go for the lowest power consumption?? What can I get for a 7200 that is about SSD like?? I don't want a 5400 Drive at all and I want great power consumption. Any Ideas???

 

[soulbrotha80]

If it's within your budget, an SSD would be the way to go for lowest power consumption. The Seagate Momentus XT is the only 7200 RPM hard drive that is sort of SSD like, but I've read the power consumption is pretty average. If you don't want to go the SSD route, I would suggest getting a Hitachi Travelstar hard drive; probably one of the lowest power consumption laptop drives I've tried so far that is 7200 RPM.

 

[RetiredChief]

Caution, some SSDs use almost as much power as some HDDs, ie around 5 Watts. So make sure the SSD you pick is infact low power, ie around 2 -> 3 Watts when ACTIVE. Performance wise a fair -> good SSD (Not just the high end) will out preform the mechanical HDDs. Random 4 K read/writes, 10 -> 40 times better, access time 0.1 or 0.2 mSec vs 10->12 milliseconds for a HDD.

If for a desktop, don't sweat the power difference - insignificant percentage wise. Only a concern for laptops and max run time on battery.

 

[mikeyp410]

Thanks for all your help. I actually had a issue getting back to this thread, sorry it took so long to read.