SPCR

I was thinking of getting a Intel X25-V SSD for a situation where i want to keep power usage down. The power usage is supposed to be very low for that drive, and it'd be a shame to raise it significantly because of the enclosure. Any idea what kind of power usage is typical? It'll be connected by esata, thus making this excess power avoidable in principle.

There's not much to a 2.5" drive enclosure, so its power usage would be negligible. It is the 3.5" enclosures that may suck a bit of extra juice, due to the need for a 'wall wart'.

Even a power usage of 500 mW, which is quite possible, seems wasteful. Has anyone ever measured what the extra DC power consumption for a external housing is?

The power of the enclosure itself would be negligible I think. A 2.5" enclosure is often powered via USB, so no inefficient wallwart.

500mW, how much is that? At say 20 cents / KWh that would cost you about 88 cents a year.

edit: Didn't read your post correctly, I see now that you will go eSATA, which is a good thing. Main concern would be the power supply then. Most efficient I think would be to let the computer PSU feed the enclosure. Usually a 2.5" eSATA enclosure comes with a USB cable that's used to power the unit. At least my Scythe 2.5" USB/eSATA enclosure does. If you only got a wallwart perhaps you could steal 5v from the computer PSU somehow. Shouldn't be that difficult.

A bad housing may leave the sata to usb bridge running. And 500 mW may not seem like a lot, but if you're buying an SSD for the low power usage, then it is a lot. The idea is to attach it a very low power server (something in the range of 2.5-5.0 W AC). It's mainly an excercise in how low can you go. Ofcource i'm already planning to power it by usb, to avoid unnecesary AC/DC losses.

nm

madman2003 wrote:It'll be connected by esata, thus making this excess power avoidable in principle.

There doesn't need to be any active electronics in a eSATA enclosure. Just a eSATA plug and a USB plug for power is all it needs. Both the power and data are just passed-through. There is even a card reader with eSATA and a barrel plug jack for 5V supply, but a USB cable would work just as fine. The only 2.5" SATA drives that require 12V supply are the Velociraptors, and it is not like any of the 2.5" enclosures are designed for those.