Benchmark Results: Power Consumption
After our Intel SSD 310 review, I attempted to find away to specifically measure the power consumed by the drive alone. Our new benchmark configuration consists of a smart battery that allows us to measure DC power consumption on the +5 V and +12 V power rails. As the VelociRaptor also uses the +3.3 V rail, we were unable to include it in the test. This will be remedied in our next test.
In the meantime, our results are unexpected. The Vertex 3 Pro actually manages to use less power than the Vertex 2. SandForce and OCZ both tell us that the maximum power envelope on the SF-2582 is 4 W--double the power specification of SF-1200/SF-1500.
The SF-2000 family has a new feature that allows performance throttling based on a setting in the firmware. If you want to limit performance to 2 W, the latest controller is capable of that. However, we are told that this drive has no such firmware limitation, so it’s possible we aren't really stressing the drive to the point of seeing its higher power consumption.
With that said, our results clearly point out that a disk-based drive will absolutely consume more power. At the system level, it is possible that an SSD could increase power consumption because CPU and memory utilization rises in response to improved I/O activity (they're not sitting there, waiting on a hard drive to send data). But remember that a SSD based configuration will always finish those operations faster. At the end of the day, a SSD will lower power consumption.
| PCMark Vantage (x64) HDD Suite | Average Power Rating (W) | ActualPower Used (mW) | AverageCPU utilization (%) | Completion Time (mm:ss) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kingston SSDNow 100 V+ | 0.6 | 85 | 14.7 | 8:06 |
| OCZ Agility 2 | 1.4 | 186 | 10.9 | 7:54 |
| Intel X25-M | 1.4 | 242 | 10.8 | 10:17 |
| OCZ Vertex 3 Pro | 1.6 | 207 | 15.1 | 7:41 |
| OCZ Vertex 2 | 1.9 | 269 | 13.9 | 8:28 |
| Seagate Momentus 5400.6 | 2.2 | 426 | 10.4 | 11:40 |
| G.Skill SATA II FM-25S2S-64GB | 2.6 | 369 | 13.5 | 8:40 |