Remember that report that Tom’s Hardware did about how SSDs don’t necessarily save you battery life? Yeah, turns out not so much. Tom’s has now posted an apology and a brand new version of their test. I’ll let them describe what happened the first time around:
First of all, we want to take this opportunity and apologize to our readers, for we made a procedural mistake when we compared battery runtime of various Flash SSDs, which we used to replace a 7,200 RPM hard drive on a business notebook in an effort to compare battery life of SSDs versus a conventional hard drive. As it was commented by our readers (see comments of that article) and other sources (thanks, George), part of the test procedure was inaccurate because of varying workload. This may cause other system components such as the CPU to be used more intensively, hence contributing to draining the battery earlier than on a slower drive.
So, now that Tom’s has run a second test, what have they concluded? Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no blanket answer to the question of whether or not solid state drives save battery life. Some drives are very energy efficient, but so are some conventional hard drives. It varies on which models you use, and what you’re planning on doing with them, but right now it’s not so simple as to say that all solid state drives are more power efficient than all platter-based hard drives.
Damn. And here we were hoping for some easy generalizations we could make. Guess it’s time to start new hoaxes. Let’s see…I hear solid state drives make babies cry. Pass it on.
I've heard that solid state drives caused global warming.
I hear solid state drives are liquid inside.