Solid-state hard disks don’t help battery life
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In an interesting test by the folks over at Tom’s Hardware, solid-state drives (SSDs) suck more power than their platter-based counterparts. Why should you care? Because the MacBook Air features an SSD in its higher-end configurations.
Tom’s looked at four different SSD models, and compared them with a 7,200 RPM disk of the same size. One disk, from Crucial, touted its “low power consumption” in marketing materials. However, the disk reduced its test laptop’s battery runtime from seven hours to six hours. Ouch.
SSDs are significantly faster, of course, but the idea that they consume less power appears to be false. As manufacturers develop thinner and thinner sub-notebooks, power consumption can only become more and more important.
