Results: Power Consumption
Idle Power Consumption
Idle consumption is the most important power metric for consumer and client SSDs. After all, solid-state drives complete host commands quickly, and then drop back down to idle. Aside from the occasional background garbage collection and house keeping, a modern SSD spends most of its life doing very little. Enterprise-oriented drives are more frequently used at full tilt, making their idle power numbers far less important. But this just isn't the case on the desktop, where the demands of client and consumer computing leave most SSDs sitting on their hands for long stretches of time.
The Vertex 450's idle power use is slightly less than the Vector, perhaps due to firmware/controller optimization, lower clock rates, or some combination. Both OCZ drives are still in the middle of the pack, though they're well ahead of the SSDs powered by LM87800AA silicon.
PCMark 7 Average Power Consumption
If we log power consumption through a workload, even a relatively heavy one, we see that average use is still pretty close to the idle numbers. Maximum power may spike fiercely, but, on average, the usage seen during a PCMark 7 run is pretty modest.
The PCMark 7 power log shows the Vertex 450 averaging slightly lower consumption than the Vector, with similar peaks peppered throughout.
Maximum Observed Power Consumption
We saw the Vertex 450 hitting higher maximum power numbers than the Vector. However, these results just aren't as important for consumer SSDs. It's rare you'll see drives pulling down this much power for anything more than a few seconds per hour.
