Spring 2010 Solid State Drive Roundup, Part 1

Benchmark Results: Power Consumption And Efficiency

Idle power runs lowest on the Toshiba and Intel SSDs. All others share second place with similar power requirements.

While Intel’s X25-M is best at delivering data quickly, it's also the most power-hungry drive in this situation. Competing drives only slightly trail on read throughput, but they need around half the power for delivering data sequentially and continuously.

Intel wins again, but shares the top spot with Toshiba. Delivering HD video requires 0.2W on the Intel and Toshiba drives while the others need at least twice this amount.

The Toshiba HG2 obviously hasn't been optimized for high I/O activity. Intel’s X25-M flies fastest here, but it chews through a decent amount of power in the process. The drives based Indilinx's Barefoot controller are most efficient here.

Thanks to extremely low power consumption for streaming reads, Toshiba brings home the gold in our efficiency test. Intel is fast, but it requires much more power than the competition. All three Indilinx drives are somewhere in between.

The picture changes if we look at I/O efficiency. Toshiba gets trounced due to its high power consumption and poor workstation I/O performance. Intel makes the test look effortless. Keep in mind that a large number of IOPS is less relevant for consumer applications.