Flash Drive Vs. Hard Drive Battery Consumption

Traditional hard drives need enough power to spin a disk up to 7200 RPM.

Flash memory is faster to access than a typical hard drive because it does not have to rely on the speed of a spinning disk. Another advantage of a flash drive is that it typically consumes less power than a traditional hard drive.

Description

Traditional hard drives store information on a magnetic disk that spins at up to 7200 RPM. In contrast, flash hard drives, or solid state drives, have no moving parts, storing information much like a USB flash drive.

Advantage

In theory, a flash drive should draw less power that a conventional hard drive, because of the way its accesses information. This means that a laptop user should see longer battery life when using a solid state drive versus a traditional hard drive.

Considerations

Still, several independent tests don't show dramatic increases in battery life when using a flash drive as compared to a traditional hard drive. One test by Computerworld shows that in comparable laptops running identical software, flash drive only increase battery life by 5 minutes.

References

• Anandtech: The MacBook Air
• Computer World: Review-Hard Disk vs. Solid-State Drive-is an SSD Worth the Money?

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish