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Notebook Battery Life
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We expected Marvell's controller (built on a 28nm process) to fare better in our notebook battery life power test. Not only do Samsung's models deliver better battery life, but even the M6e Black Edition outperforms the Predator here.
We believe the HyperX Predator is working harder in the background than its competition to maintain high performance. This can be seen with the drive connected to power-monitoring hardware. Let's say you transfer a 500MB file to the Predator. It uses a lot of power once the transfer is finished, illustrating the additional background activity. Some products shuffle data at a slower rate to save power, while others are aggressive.
Background activity is also why we don't measure SSD power in four-corner tasks. A drive may sip power in these specific benchmarks, but then use more while it moves information around. This can materialize as a spike while shuffling data quickly or increased consumption over time as data is moved around. Both scenarios are represented incorrectly when looking at power use for short periods of time. The notebook battery life tests allow us to measure power over a much longer duration and in a meaningful way.
The PCIe-based M.2 SSDs all deliver nearly identical performance in a power-restricted state. SATA products often demonstrate wider variation between models.
