The SSD Power Consumption Hoax

Performance x Battery Runtime Index

Performance x Battery Runtime Index

Finally, we decided to relate drive performance and battery runtime. As we want to have as many battery minutes as possible and as much performance as possible, we multiplied both results and divided the result by 1,000 to get an overall figure.

The Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 clearly provides the best combination of performance and energy efficiency, followed by the Sandisk drive. The SSD5000 by Sandisk isn’t exactly the fastest — in fact, it turned out to be relatively slow — but it was the only flash SSD that we consider energy efficient. It did not decrease the battery runtime, and provided almost the same performance results as the 2.5” Travelstar 7K200.

The Memoright and Mtron drives only manage to stay in the middle field because they deliver strong performance. As they consume more power when real life applications are used — remember the decreased battery runtime — they have to make up for the battery runtime losses by their performance.