Power Consumption: Idle And 4 KB Random (Windows 7/Mac OS X)
Idle
Because SSDs are so fast, they sit idle most of the time. It's true! In almost our almost-30-minute virus scan, the SSD was only busy for 281 seconds. As a result, idle power consumption is the most important figure to consider in a desktop environment.
Samsung's 830 does exceptionally well here. Even though it employs a beefy triple-core ARM-based controller, it consumes slightly less power than Crucial's m4 and its dual-core ARM-based Marvell controller.
The Intel SSD 520 consumes the most power (even exceeding the Vertex 3).
4 KB Random Read
Tasked with a workload, the SandForce-based drives use more power than their competition. At a queue depth of one, the 60 GB SSD 520 and Vertex 3 both consume 0.5 W more than the 256 GB m4 and 830, regardless of whether you're on a Mac or PC.
4 KB Random Write
The drives based on SandForce's controller achieve higher 4 KB random write performance than the competition, while using less power.