Digital Home Thoughts: Myth: Flash Hard Drives Improve Battery Life

"Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be the future of performance hard drives, and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. We are no exception, as we have been publishing many articles on flash-based SSDs during the last few months, emphasizing the performance gains and the potential power savings brought by flash memory. And there is nothing wrong with this, since SLC flash SSDs easily outperform conventional hard drives today (SLC = single level cell). However, we have discovered that the power savings aren't there: in fact, battery runtimes actually decrease if you use a flash SSD."



Raise your hand if you thought Flash Hard Drives improved the battery life of your laptop. I fell for the same myth and am slightly disappointed, but Tom's Hardware has run a few SSD (solid-state drives) through the paces, and their results show that, even though these drives don't have moving parts, the battery life isn't any better compared to old-fashioned spinning hard drives. Their review is extremely thorough, so if you're wanting to get the low-down on SSD performance and battery life, check out the linked article!