Power Consumption Testing
We perform our idle power testing after a few minutes of drive inactivity, but without any platform power-saving mechanisms affecting our measurements. This means that each drive gets the chance to switch into its most conservative active idle mode.
Although Seagate promises lower power consumption with its 750 GB Momentus XT, we didn't see that from the idle measurement. The company's new drive draws a fairly typical 0.8 W.
Our next benchmark measures power during our Iometer-based database workload. The result is 3.3 W of power consumption from the Momentus XT 750 GB. Although not particularly impressive, this is still in the ballpark for what we've seen from 2.5" hard drives in the past.
Even an SSD can use roughly that much power in the same workload. Memoright's 240 GB FTM Plus clocks in just .1 W less.
The video playback power consumption test shows how much power a drive requires, on average, while delivering an HD video stream.
Again, we see Seagate's Momentus XT at the upper end of our range, though it's still under 2 W.
