Active Idle Power Consumption
Idle consumption is the most important power metric for consumer and client SSDs. After all, solid-state drives complete host commands quickly and then drop back down to idle. Aside from the occasional background garbage collection, a modern SSD spends most of its life doing very little. Enterprise-oriented drives are more frequently used at full tilt, making their idle power numbers less relevant. But this just isn't the case on the desktop, where the demands of client and consumer computing leave most SSDs sitting on their hands for long stretches of time.
Active idle power numbers are critical, especially when it comes to their impact on mobile platforms. Idle means different things on different systems, though. Pretty much every drive we're testing is capable of one or more low-power states, up to and including DevSlp. That last feature is a part of the SATA 3.2 host specification. And while it requires a capable SSD and a compatible platform, enabling DevSlp takes power consumption down to a very small number.
Measuring the power use of a SATA-based drive is fairly straightforward; you tap into the 5 or 12 V rail, do some multimeter work, and a bit of math. A PCI Express SSD is more difficult to get readings from. You can either use a riser card, like Igor does in our graphics card reviews, or employ a special purpose-built device.
I do the latter. Active idle is reported as a rule, so I disable the bus' sleep states to yield an equivalent to my SATA storage testing. Yes, the two PCIe-based drives can drop to lower idle power when the slot falls into a low-power condition. But we're concerning ourselves with active results in order to make the right comparison.
There is a trio of states to watch out for:
- L0 is active power/active use
- L0s is active power/idle state
- L1 is low power/slumber state
Plextor claims a .58 W idle specification, and that's pretty darned close to what we observe in PCMark 7.
PCMark 7 Average Power Consumption
If we log power consumption through a workload, even a relatively heavy one, we see that average use is still pretty close to the idle numbers. Maximum power may spike fiercely, but the draw during a PCMark 7 run is light. You can see the drives fall back down to the idle "floor" between peaks of varying intensity.

The M6e uses less power than SanDisk's A110 through PCMark 7. It also checks in just under Plextor's M6S and M6M.

After quite a bit of power testing, logging, and fiddling with Excel, we end up with the above chart.
SanDisk doesn't specify its idle consumption in the A110's documentation, though Plextor does. But it looks like both SSDs sit idle around the half-watt mark. The A110 does spent a lot more time above idle than Plextor's M6e, and after some discussion with Plextor, it appears there are ways to bring that figure down even more in certain scenarios. But PCIe power management is an entirely different beast, and I continue refining the testing.
- Plextor Gets A Jump on PCIe-Based M.2
- A PCIe Controller And Toshiba NAND
- How We Test Plextor's M6e SSD
- Results: Sequential Read And Write Performance
- Results: Random Performance
- Results: Performance Variation
- Results: Tom's Hardware Storage Bench v1.0
- Results: Tom's Hardware Storage Bench v1.0, Continued
- Results: Power Consumption
- Results: TRIM Testing With ULINK's DriveMaster 2012
- PCMark 8's Storage Consistency Test
- A Sexy Form Factor You'll Want More Than Need

raid 0. too expensive. that plextor
I bought a Lenovo Y410P shortly after they were released (and was incorrectly told it had mSATA not NGFF/M.2 for the SSD), and have been waiting over a year for a decent M.2 drive to put in it.
The drive itself has no wasted space. The bridge board has plenty, being that the drive is only 22mm x 80mm.
Regards,
Christopher Ryan
It adds all of about a second. You'll never notice, and based on UEFI settings, you might never even see the Plextor op-rom splash screen at post.
Regards,
Christopher Ryan
I bought a Lenovo Y410P shortly after they were released (and was incorrectly told it had mSATA not NGFF/M.2 for the SSD), and have been waiting over a year for a decent M.2 drive to put in it.
On the desktop, the demand for M.2 storage is not very high yet. In laptops, SATA M.2s are in high demand, but there isn't much reason to have a pure M.2 native PCIe Phy drive in a desktop yet. The M6e we looked at is built around the AIB bridge board, and thus isn't detachable from the M.2 drive itself, so despite the M.2 drive at the heart of the board, you still really can't buy a M.2 native PCIe drive yet. And even if you bought a M6e, ripped it out of the bridge board, and installed it in the Lenovo -- it probably wouldn't see more than a single lane of connectivity.
Regards,
Christopher Ryan
BTW: I know it will void the warranty.
BTW: I know it will void the warranty.
BTW: I know it will void the warranty.
I posted the same question in the forums, and got an answer: NO!
If I wish to use a m.2 SSD, it looks like I'd have to get a Crucial M550 m.2 SATA SSD. No PCI-e SSD's available yet!
EDIT: 06/11/2014 - BTW, YES it will work. Mine does! And it uses the 2 PCI-e channels. My Z97 mobo sees it with no problems! That's what I'm running now.
Will be great to have these for notebooks, though an adapter will be needed for current releases, negating any performance gains. Because this option isn't dependent on, nor was designed for, a SATA 3 port. A true PCI-e port will be needed.
Who said that the PC was dead, again? We have every reason to keep them very much alive.
Cat