On the internet, you can find various tips and tricks to improve a laptop’s battery life. But, you won’t find many articles or guides talking about the impact of your storage drive on the battery life. If you want to understand whether upgrading to an SSD from an HDD or a SATA SSD to NVMe will improve your laptop’s battery life, this article is for you.
If for some reason, your laptop is running on a hard drive, it is good to switch to an SSD first of all. Along with the battery life, you will also get a huge boost in the performance. Now, let’s get to the point and tell you what you can expect with an SSD.
Before starting, I would like to say that your CPU, GPU, Display, and RAM are the most power-hungry components in your laptop. When doing normal tasks like surfing the internet or editing documents, your secondary drives are hardly under any load. The CPU can just pull the required data and load it to the RAM. Unless you are reading and writing big amounts of files to your secondary storage (HDD/SSD), you shouldn’t worry about power consumption.
The power consumption of the storage drives is often in spikes. They are utilized for some amount of time and then are mostly idle. However, I will try to answer your question in detail in this article.
Why does HDD consume more battery in laptops?
A Hard disk drive is a mechanical drive with several essential parts that are mechanical. Along with its circuitry, the hard drive has to move a motor to rotate the plates. Also, the read/write head moves with the help of electric voltage. Now, because a hard drive would generally be using less power than an SSD at a given time while doing the same task, it would keep using the same amount of power for longer periods. This increases the total power consumption for the same task.
Because of their slow speed, HDDs spend more time in an active state when retrieving or storing data, leading to increased power consumption. Overall, the combination of mechanical components, heat generation, constant spinning, high latency, and less energy-efficient design makes HDDs consume more power in laptops.
Will an upgrade to SSD improve my laptop’s battery life?
If you have ever read this article from Scality, you will get to read some insights about SSD power consumption that are opposite from the common beliefs. It says that the SSDs (High-Density QLC) are better in terms of power efficiency from the hard drives in just idle states. In all other scenarios where these drives are working, hard drives are more power-efficient. This is largely true but, in reality, the overall power consumption (usage) to do the same task by both drives will be different. The SSD can get the work done pretty fast than any hard drive. This surely comes with a sudden spike in power consumption but the hard drive will keep using the same amount of power for longer periods.
First of all, the idle power consumption in SSDs is very low. So, when the CPU isn’t actively reading or writing the data from and to the SSD, it would hardly consume more than 1 watts. Also, the read/write operations get done pretty fast and this helps with reduced overall power.
How do SSDs help in saving battery?
The best thing about the SSDs is they come with additional power-saving features like sleep and low-power states. Also, most SSDs use dynamic power scaling which adjusts the power consumption based on the workload. These features make sure that the SSD isn’t wasting any power when it is not needed.
SSDs spend less time writing and reading the data because there is no mechanical movement to locate the data and then write it. The FTL on the SSDs maps each and every data location and because everything is running with the electric current, the time taken for doing tasks is far less than on hard drives.
Which type of SSDs are the most power efficient?
SATA SSDs because of their slowest speed than any other SSDs consume less power in both idle and working states. If we talk about the NVMe drives, their speed dictates the total power consumption. The latest Gen 5.0 drives like Crucial T700 can have peak power consumptions of 10 to 12 watts during heavy write operations. However, the work is getting done within seconds which would take minutes in SATA Drives and even hours on a hard drive.
The idle power consumption of both M.2 and 2.5″ SATA SSDs is below 2 watts. The peak power consumption during heavy operations will stay near around 7 watts. You can always check the idle and active power consumption of your SSDs on its product page or datasheet.
Power Consumption of different SSDs
The overall power consumed by an SSD or any other storage device will depend on the usage and various other factors. But, if you are curious to know the actual values, below is that information for you.
Conclusion:
Don’t expect a very high difference in power consumption because storage drives aren’t the most power-hungry components on your system. The CPU, GPU, RAM, Display, motherboard, etc consume most of your laptop’s battery power. However, you will see some benefits going for the SSD over an HDD.
Typical Improvement: 10% to 30% increase in battery life especially when you don’t do intense read/write tasks.
In Certain Scenarios: Up to 40% improvement for read/write-intensive workloads. This is mainly when you frequently move big volumes of data between your drives.
So, there isn’t a very big difference in the overall power consumption but something is better than nothing.