SSD drastically reduced battery life (estimated)

[blair]

Hi,

Bought a laptop the other week came with a 500GB 7200rpm hard drive and windows reckons i would get 7-8hour use word processing and based on how long i used it and the percentage it ran down seemed about right.

Now i wanted a ssd for games and loading apps faster the corsair force 3 24GB version (says on packet improve notebook battery life) and doing the same task even the same word document windows thinks i will get 4-5 hours battery and this also seems about right when i use it.

My question is when SSD's use less power than a normal HDD am i getting worse battery life?

 

[chazzzer]

The Corsair Force 3 240GB is a power hog, consuming 4.6 watts max while active and 0.6 watts max at idle. In comparison, the Corsair Force 3 120GB only consumes 2.0 watts max active and 0.5 watts max at idle, and the WD Scorpio Black 500GB 7200RPM 2.5" hard drive consumes 1.75 watts max active and 0.8 watts max at idle.

Still, even if you were constantly accessing your SSD (which you wouldn't be), that's only an extra 3 watts or so over what the hard drive would consume. Your laptop should consume far more power than the SSD, so I'm not sure why Windows is saying your battery life will be impacted that much.