Power Consumption
Power Consumption
SSDs are so fast that they spend much of their time sitting idle, making that the most important power measurement to consider in a desktop environment.
Samsung's 64 GB 830 is an especially power-conscious product. Even though it employs a beefy triple-core ARM-based controller, the 830 uses less power than Crucial's m4 and its dual-core controller from Marvell.
Even though the manufacturers who use SandForce's technology are taking advantage of a turnkey controller, each vendor is responsible for its own power circuitry design. As a result, even as raw performance is quite consistent, there's a lot more variation in how much power each SSD uses.
We're actually pretty surprised to see that Intel's SSD 520 and 330 use more power than the competition. This could be Intel's solution to a blue-screen issue caused, in part, by insufficient power delivery to SandForce-based drives when they're woken up.