Results: Power Consumption And Efficiency
Power Consumption
The Laptop Ultrathin HDD’s read and write results turn out to be thoroughly average (which isn't bad for a product designed for constrained dimensions, not for blazing speed). But its power consumption is another story entirely. Since the 5 mm drive only has one platter to spin, it doesn't burn a lot of juice. Seagate posts good numbers overall, not always topping the charts, but certainly trending higher than it did in the performance benchmarks, drawing between 0.5 W at idle and 2.7 W at maximum data transfer speed.
Efficiency
The ratio of performance to power consumption gives us some insight into each hard drive's efficiency, and the usage scenarios to which they're best suited. The streaming writes and database efficiency of Seagate's Laptop Ultrathin HDD are top-of-the-line compared to other 2.5" products spinning at 5400 RPM.