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SSDs, or solid state drives, are very much the fashion at the moment amid claims that they represent a substantial power saving over standard hard drives – but a new report suggests that they are actually worse for battery life.
Hardcore tech site Tom’s Hardware has published detailed results of a number of tests, all of which suggest that laptops boasting SSD storage run out of juice faster than those sporting good ‘ol fashioned HDD storage.
“Flash-based solid state drives are considered to be the future of performance hard drives, emphasizing the performance gains and the potential power savings brought by flash memory,” the site states.
“However, we have discovered that the power savings aren’t there. In fact, battery runtimes actually decrease if you use a flash SSD.
“Our results are definitely correct. We’ve looked at almost a dozen different flash SSDs from seven vendors over the last few months, and measured acceptable or sometimes even disappointing power requirements with most flash SSDs.
“The results of our testing are a shock for anyone who cares about battery runtime, as our results prove unmistakably that battery runtimes do not increase when using flash based SSDs. As a matter of fact, most flash SSD products actually contribute to emptying your battery even faster.”
