Results: Power Consumption
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 and house keeping, 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 far less important. 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.
It might turn out that the only issue with SanDisk's Extreme II we stumble across is higher power demands. The idle numbers are a little above average, but still within a reasonable range.
PCMark 7 Average Power Consumption
A log of our PCMark 7 run shows higher-than-average power spikes, both in intensity and frequency. Still, we're not calling this a big deal yet.
The Extreme IIs fall to the back of the pack in average PCMark 7 power consumption. Only Corsair's Neutron GTX fares worse on average. The 120 GB Extreme II surprisingly finishes second-to-last, suggesting that the smallest family member has to work harder in this benchmark, despite the higher peak power consumption seen from the 240 and 480 GB models.
Maximum Observed Power Consumption
These results just aren't as important for consumer SSDs. It's rare you see drives pulling down this much power for anything more than a few seconds per hour.
