Laptop HDD vs SSD?

johnno · Post by **johnno** » Wed Jul 02, 2008 11:10 am

Hi all,

I'm upgrading a sort-of embedded device of mine (a NAS) with a larger boot partition so I can mess about with alternate OS'es and such.

Up till now, i'd assumed I was going to replace the current 256MB DOM with a smallish 2.5" SSD (say 8 GB).
(The CPU is cooled by the case fans [via ducting], and the case contains 4 hot 3.5" HDD's, so I don't want to add much more heat to the case than as designed for).

Anyways, the recent Tom's Hardware article claiming that SSD's use more power than laptop HDD's got me thinking... (let's assume that the article isn't off by more than an order of magnitude either way)
Is it pointless to get a SSD at 2x the cost of a much larger HDD, if i'm only going to be saving a watt or so, if that?

What do you guys think?

Vicotnik · Post by **Vicotnik** » Wed Jul 02, 2008 12:38 pm

Tom is full of shit as always..

viewtopic.php?t=48918

suzyj · Post by **suzyj** » Wed Jul 02, 2008 2:31 pm

Vicotnik wrote:Tom is full of shit as always..

viewtopic.php?t=48918

The testing methodology is clearly broken, but even so, a couple of these SSDs appear to have really revolting idle power use of up to 2W.

That's going to result in dreadful battery use, even if you're not using the machine at all.

andyb · Post by **andyb** » Wed Jul 02, 2008 3:01 pm

I pointed out that Toms review was seriously wrong because of the methodology, they were really "using the HDD/SDD's" which wont be the case in a server environment at all, so whatever uses the least amount of power when doing nothing wins.

The answer should ideally be nothing as the drive/SSD would go to sleep, this is not that effective within windows, but I understand can be 100% effective within Linux as all logging can be turned off, and everything that does not actually read from the drive at boot up time is run through RAM so the drive stays asleep.

As the machine you are talking about is a NAS box, you can easily get away with a bootable CF (compact flash) card and an adaptor (you need a PATA channel available).

They (as far as I know) use hardly any power, are dirt cheap, are very small, and dont need any cooling.

Various people on SPCR do/did use CF cards for this /similar kinds of purposes, have a look afound the forums for more info.

Andy