On the heels of Apple’s $500 price cut on its high-end 64GB MacAir laptop, statistics from a number of Internet news services are at odds on whether SSDs have better or worse battery performance compared with legacy hard drives.
When Tom’s Hardware came out with an article suggesting that the power performance of leading hard drives was better than that of SSDs,
the results seemed counter-intuitive. The lack of moving parts on NAND Flash-based drives should translate into power savings, but the tests ran counter to that.
A number of possible explanations may be work here. Perhaps the inherent better random access of SSDs means that the testing program involved was able to run faster, and in completing more cycles, such up more energy. Another possibility is that the percentage fill of the hard drives under test tipped the scale towards the hard drive makers. The reasoning goes that the performance of traditional hard drives deteriorate as the drive gets more full – since a hard drive is mechanical in nature, the hard drive consumes more power as a little reader within the drive has to travel longer distances across the surface of the hard drive. SSDs don’t suffer from this problem as it’s just a bunch of flash chips wired together.
A second series of tests from Laptop Magazine seems to refute the article from Tom’s Hardware showing a 10% improvement in battery performance, though their test was problematic as well because only two SSD makers and one traditional HD maker were represented in the tests. The test scenarios were different from Tom’s set of tests, performing more typical day-to-day activities like surfing a web page repeatedly.
While a 10% is not enough a differential to get excited about, the bottom line is that the reduced form factor, light weight, and resistance to shocks (through no moving parts) are equally important for mobile notebooks and netbooks. Very good unit growth in this area is a virtual certainty over the coming twelve months (and with the 3G iPhone hitting stores on July 11th), though as always, the falling prices in this area suggest that we are some time off in getting a huge amount of manufacturing capacity in NAND flash matched up with end market demand.
However, the bottom line is that this assessment of the relative performance of SSDs versus traditional hard drives is showing that there is a compelling case for more SSDs in portable laptops and smartphones. And with SSDs still having some upside in power performance as manufacturers move up the knowledge curve, SSDs will likely hit a “tipping point” in price/performance which could see much more penetration of SSDs across the board, which would be a negative to legacy drive makers like Western Digital and Seagate.
