Comments on: SSD hard drives tank laptop battery life

By: Jok

Jok — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:35:39 +0000

SSD is not there yet, rock on IDE :p

By: Jaap

Jaap — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:34:35 +0000

how come?

By: SwedishViking

SwedishViking — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:59:26 +0000

Hi, i'm just wondering about what you wrote (@desire).

I actually tried to install the OS on a SD card on my ASUS Pund-it computer and it didn't work because the windows installation could not detect the SD card as a valid drive to install to. Was a while ago now, but think I tried with Ubuntu as well.

Is this a matter of me using a plain SD card instead of a SDHC card? So SD cards are not bootable but SDHC is?

Or perhaps just the MB/BIOS that didn't support it?!

By: Kyle

Kyle — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:10:04 +0000

@desire

For a few years I've used a compact flash card in an cf-ide adapter, like bigd recommended. I got a new laptop, which had a sata hard drive. cf-sata adapters cost too much ($50), and the laptop had a built in sd card reader. I was worried the SD card would be too slow, but those fears were unjustified.

Long story short, simply popped the SD card into the laptop and installed an operating system from cdrom. The trick is to run linux. Even from flash, it will still run faster than windows.

Right now, the sweet spot is a 16 gb sdhc card. Alternatively, I've done one computer with a 16gb usb flash drive. Get out a soldering iron and flip an extra USB connector around, so the flash drive does not hang outside the laptop.

By: BigD145

BigD145 — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:55:05 +0000

@desire

You can get boards that will convert CF and even SD to sata and ide and such. Sometimes you can find a 2in1 that will raid a couple cards and still fit the laptop HD standard. Try dealextreme.

By: Wolf

Wolf — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:31:53 +0000

Toms hardware's conclusions seam pretty sound, but the guys at /. really tore this article apart http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/02/134256

By: desire athow

desire athow — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:02:41 +0000

@Kyle

How did you do that actually…

By: Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:02:14 +0000

It is a little more complicated. Flash is much lower power than a hard drive. However, a dozen flash chips raided together (to boost speed) are indeed more power hungry than a hard drive. The new generation of high speed SSD all do this.

Use different tech, and you reap the power savings. My battery life nearly doubled when I removed a 7200 rpm hard drive and replaced it with an SDHC card.

By: Nico

Nico — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:45:31 +0000

In a laptop the backlight and CPU are bigger power sinks than the disk, so even if a SSD drew less power than a conventional one, this wouldn’t be that helpful at prolonging battery life. C’mon Hackaday – let’s see some low-power LCD backlight replacement projects!

By: Eyuras

Eyuras — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:13:54 +0000

Interesting article but its really just a flaw with current generation SSD’s having no power saving features at the moment. There are a few flaws with the testing style but it does raise an issue that i hope will be fixed before SSD’s become mainstream!

By: ak

ak — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:52:16 +0000

Can’t the ssd powerdown when not needed?

By: adam

adam — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:01:21 +0000

SSD hard drives also have MUCH slower than HDDs, something like 45mb/s. Their read speed is much faster though.

By: BigD145

BigD145 — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:41:42 +0000

The results have already been shown to be questionable.

By: sunjester

sunjester — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:37:32 +0000

looks like something ive seen inside a slot machine, could it be?

By: Man On Fire

Man On Fire — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:23:34 +0000

what I’d like to see is tests done on CF card converters. CF cards reach about the same storage density (32gb), for about half the price (140usd, + 20usd for the converter)