Power Consumption & Battery Life

Intel lists the idle power consumption of the X25-M at 0.06W and the "typical workload" power consumption as 150mW. This is far lower than any conventional hard drive and relatively comparable to other SSDs.

In a desktop system using the Intel X25-M will shave off around 3 - 5W of total system power at the outlet under idle or load conditions. The savings are less compared to a 2.5" drive, but the real question there is how much more battery life do you get if you switch to the X25-M?

We didn't have enough time to run through a full suite of battery life tests but using MobileMark 2007's Productivity test I looked at the Intel X25-M, the OCZ Core (JMicron based MLC), the OCZ SLC SSD (Samsung based SLC) and the Seagate Momentus 7200.2.

MobileMark 2007 - Productivity Test

Overall performance was highest on the OCZ SLC SSD, but only marginally compared to the Intel X25-M. The OCZ Core managed to come in third place, still faster than the mechanical disk.

MobileMark 2007 - Productivity Test

The battery life of the system was actually lower with the OCZ Core, presumably thanks to the strange write performance issues. But generally the SLC, MLC and HDD all last around the same amount of time. Intel's X25-M boosted battery life by a bit over 6% or 27 minutes, not an insignificant increase in battery life.

The Killer App: Multitasking Performance Final Words
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  • aeternitas - Thursday, September 11, 2008 - link

    I dont know where you shop, but 100$ can get you 750GB.


    It doesnt make much of a point anyway, as flash based and typical hard drives will coexist for at least the next ten years. One for preformance, the other for storage.

    Maybe some of you are too young to remember, but it was only about 10 years ago that a 20GB hard drive cost 200$ at costco. We are a huge step in terms of the new technology from where we were before. 32 GB for 100$? Yes please. In ten years i expect to see 3+TB flash drives running over 1GBps throughput for around 200$.
  • strikeback03 - Thursday, September 11, 2008 - link

    I assume they were referring to 2.5 inch drives, as those prices are more in line with what was stated.

    Also don't forget that with the drop in $/GB of drives has come an increase in demand for storage. Ten years ago digital photography was almost non-existent, with file sizes topping out under a megabyte. Images on the web were maybe 640x480. Now we have digital cameras that average 4-6MB as JPEGs, and some can turn out images over 30MB, not counting the medium-format backs (over 100MB IIRC for the 65Megapixel Phase 1). When I was in college any movie you saw on the network was sized to fit a 700MB CD, Now HD movies can range well over that. MP3s are still the same, or you can store in a lossless format if you choose.

    Will 3TB be small in 10 years? Possibly. The key for flash completely replacing mechanical will be getting the price low enough to hold large amounts of the current data.
  • aeternitas - Saturday, September 13, 2008 - link

    Even if they were useing 2.5" drives in the example, it doesnt matter. The fact that these drives will be replaceing 3.5" ones makes their point just as misguided in the point they were trying to make.

    Laptop and desktop drives were differant due to size, now they arnt, so you cant comapair them (HDD vs SSD) in such a illogical manner.
  • Blimeynext - Friday, April 23, 2010 - link

    "Intel went one step further and delivered 5x what the OEMs requested. Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact."

    Any tool out there which tells me how much I write to my HDD each day? It would be nice to find out my present usage and compare it with the 100 GB/day limit....

    If I write less than 20GB a day does that mean the SSD will last at least 25 years?
  • Smokerz - Sunday, January 2, 2011 - link

    http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/...

    read it all
  • Smokerz - Sunday, January 2, 2011 - link

    sorry for the misspell

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