Hardware support: Your choice of SSD will have a significant impact on the battery life of your laptop

Your choice of SSD will have a significant impact on the battery life of your laptop
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Your choice of SSD will have a significant impact on the battery life of your laptop

Posted: 08 Jul 2020 09:17 AM PDT

It's remarkable in 2020 how it seems no-one is aware of the huge difference in battery life that drives will give you on your laptop, regardless of the vast majority having similar low power states available. The controller and the type of NAND used will both have a massive impact on how much power the drive draws when in use. [EDIT: as well as low power to active state latency times, thanks to u/wtallis for pointing that out]

This is a massive list of different SSDs and their respective battery life in laptops as reviewed by Chris Ramsayer for Tweaktown: https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8856/best-ssds-notebooks-two-year-study/index3.html

As you can see, with a roughly 7 hour top score, the difference between that and mid-pack drives is about an hour, and to the very worst drives can be as much as two. When you stretch that out to something like an ultraportable that has real world battery life of 12 hours, that difference can be pretty huge. And those tests are performed with continuous usage. If the drive has certain weaknesses in terms of returning to its' low power state when your laptop is idle - or worse, your laptop is not allowing it to return to low power at all, which I have seen - then you could be looking at a sizeable dent in your battery life.

OEM Samsung drives tend to be at the head of the field when it comes to NVME, with certain drives being much better than others. And it is not always concrete that one brand will perform well at different capacities either. For instance, the 1TB version of the SM961 performs about 20 minutes better than the 512GB version (likely due to more efficient and dense NAND being used in the 1TB model).

Unfortunately Chris Ramsayer no longer does reviews for Tweaktown or Tomshardware, and they've dropped the real world battery life test from their reviews. So the above resource is the best one we'll probably ever have when it comes to selecting a good drive for laptops.

If people are curious as to just how much difference a change in NAND can make with an otherwise identical drive, have a look at this comparison between the Samsung 850 EVO v1 and v2: https://www.thessdreview.com/featured/samsung-850-evo-with-3rd-gen-48-layer-3d-v-nand-performance-comparison/

This is the most power efficient drive I have seen. It is on the SATA chart on the list above, and it beats every NVME drive measured for battery life (listed here as the 850 EVO 48L 1TB). Any laptop I've put it in has seen an extension of 1-2 hours battery life over the previous SSD. I would take 550mb read/write speed with a big bump in battery life any day of the week. Literally no difference whatsoever in real world use, unless you're copying large files constantly or working with video editing. Even boot speed depends more on the firmware of the laptop, and the amount of software loaded at startup on Windows, than the speed of the drive inside. I know that because I've witnessed 6 second bootup on a standard SATA SSD on a particularly well designed Toshiba Z30 laptop.

Also to follow on from that, it must be said that if you compared the SATA drives and the NVME drives, the most efficient SATA drives rank better than the most efficient NVME drives, and on average NVME drives do give worse battery life than SATA drives.

And it is not certain that newer models of drives will bring improvements in battery life. With mass market drives, manufacturers tend to look towards reducing manufacturing cost as a priority, and then optimizing the parts used with efficient firmware. So if a newer design uses a less efficient cheaper NAND, you will almost certainly see reductions in battery life no matter how much work goes into optimizing for the best power consumption possible. This is demonstrated by the Crucial MX300 coming far ahead of the MX500 in the SATA charts, and the 860 EVO performing terribly in comparison to the aforementioned 850 EVO (particularly the V2 48 layer version).

Hopefully this post will be useful for people asking about why their laptops have seen a reduction in battery life after they've installed a new SSD, and for people wanting the best battery life possible for their notebooks.

TL;DR - SSDs matter because every NAND type produced has differences in power consumption and how the firmware uses it. Don't rely on idle power figures released by manufacturers, they do not reflect real world use. SATA drives tend be better than NVME drives. Newer doesn't necessarily mean better. If you are looking for a good NVME drive, most OEM Samsung drives are near the top (though there are still variations between the different models/capacities). Samsung 850 EVO Version 2 with 48 layer 3D NAND is, to my knowledge, the best of any drive.

BONUS TIP: Ever wondered what difference NVME drives make in game loading times compared with SATA drives? Or what improvements PCIe Gen 4 will bring to the table vs Gen 3 in this regard?

The answer is, for the most part, very, very little. So, unless you're going to use it for something else, don't spend a ton of money on an expensive high performance drive thinking it will load your games faster - it won't. Spend your money on a good value drive with a high endurance rating and no reported issues with drop-offs in performance.

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Posted: 08 Jul 2020 04:21 PM PDT

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Posted: 08 Jul 2020 04:34 PM PDT

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Posted: 08 Jul 2020 08:38 AM PDT

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