The SSD Power Consumption Hoax

Memoright MR25.5-032S, 32 GB

The Memoright Flash SSDs have been our favorite flash SSD for some time now. They provide around 120 MB/s of read and write throughput, which bests most other flash based hard drives. Capacities of up to 128 GB are available, though they are ridiculously expensive.

The MR25.5 is based on a SATA/150 interface, which provides a maximum throughput of 126 MB/s. Looking at the performance benchmarks, this is by far the best solution for I/O intensive workloads, as it provides many more I/O operations per second than any other hard drive solution.

This drive also has the highest idle power requirements of all products in this roundup, though, not going below 2 W in idle: as a consequence, we achieved a battery runtime of only six hours and 38 minutes. This is much better than Crucial’s SSD, and Memoright provides significantly more performance as well. Still, you get almost 30 minutes more battery runtime with our Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 hard drive.

Mtron Flash SSD, 32 GB

Mtron is a Korean manufacturer of flash based SSDs and its products have been on the market for a while. We reviewed its 2.5” 32 GB Flash SSD in December 2007, and it is still one of the faster solutions available. This product isn’t an efficiency wonder, as the battery runtime on our test notebook was only six hours and six minutes. This is almost as low as it was with Crucial’s Flash SSD, but the Mtron Flash SSD provides much better write performance, higher I/O operations per second and good Mobilemark 07 performance scores. Again, the mechanical hard drive provides almost one more hour of battery runtime.