Do SSDs consume more or less power than HDDs?

[ranshaa05]

I'm planning on getting a new SSD for my brother's old laptop to bring some life back into it.

 

i tried plugging an SSD and the battery seemed to drain faster. i know that SSDs generally consume less power, but i just want to be sure.

he currently has a very basic 2.5'' 5400RPM HDD inside it and i'm thinking about upgrading it to a Kingston A400 or a Sandisk SSD Plus (both 240GB).

will i see a significant drop or improvement in battery life?

[Tan3l6]

Yes

[SpookyCitrus]

SSDs consume less power than HDDs, you should see an improvement in battery life.

[Dedayog]

17 minutes ago, ranshaa05 said:

I'm planning on getting a new SSD for my brother's old laptop to bring some life back into it.

 

i tried plugging an SSD and the battery seemed to drain faster. i know that SSDs generally consume less power, but i just want to be sure.

he currently has a very basic 2.5'' 5400RPM HDD inside it and i'm thinking about upgrading it to a Kingston A400 or a Sandisk SSD Plus (both 240GB).

will i see a significant drop or improvement in battery life?

Yes, but don't expect night and day, you won't magically gain hours of battery life.  Drives are a very small part of a computer's drain.  There's a reason PSU's are based on a CPU/GPU combo, and no one really ever asks about drives.

[RejZoR]

I remember sticking Intel 80GB SSD into ACER Aspire One instead of 160GB HDD and my battery improved quite dramatically. But those were the very early days of SSD's...

[mariushm]

Not really much difference , depends on power settings.

 

Most laptop drives consume 2.5w-4w while they run, the power is mostly wasted  in the motor that keeps the discs spinning.

The thing is when running on battery, most laptops are quite aggressive and turn off the hard drive motor often, to save power - when the hard drive doesn't spin the discs inside, the power consumption goes under 0.5w ... so for example, you'll have drive using 4w for around 30s..1m and the the motor stops to save power and drive consumes very little.

 

A SSD doesn't have anything to spin, so it uses less power all the time, usually 0.1 ... 0.3 watts . It will use a bit more power, up to around 2-3 watts, only when writing data to flash memory chips (which can be milliseconds or seconds).

 

So yeah, it will use less power, but it's not orders of magnitude less power at the end of the day, if you average out the power consumption over the day or week.