Portable Electronics Ltd // Technology you can carry.

Some useful statements as quoted from Tom's hardware

"The most energy-efficient drives are those that run at low rotation speeds such as 4,200 RPM - or even 3,600 RPM for 1.8" hard drives."

"SATA drives generally require more power than UltraATA models."

"to the power consumption results: Samsung is slightly more efficient, while the WD drive requires slightly more power. The Travelstar 5K250 doesn't have any significant disadvantage either."

The following is the power consumption section of an updated article from Tom's hardware available here that includes 250GB 2.5" SATA hard drives from Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, Western Digital and Seagate, as well as the new generation 320GB 2.5" SATA hard drives from Samsung.

Another follow-up article by Tom's hardware available here updated with 320GB 2.5" SATA hard drives from Western Digital, Toshiba and Samsung. The power consumption section is shown below.

With the advert of 500GB storage on the 2.5" factor, Tom's hardware have gave us some pointers available here on the new 500GB SATA drives from Samsung and Hitachi, together with 320GB 2.5" SATA hard drives Hitachi. The power consumption section is shown below.

"Hitachi did a great job in creating the three platter Travelstar, which maintains almost the same power requirements as the 320GB two platter Travelstar 3K320: both require approximately 1 watt of power when idle and 3 watts when active. Samsung’s new 500GB drive disappointed, as it requires 1.3 W in idle and up to 3.6 W under load."

X-bit labs has also published an article here that contains information regarding the power consumption of the latest 2.5" SATA hard drives.

Using information from both web site, we can conclude that, Hitachi's 5K250 uses the least amount of power in SATA 2.5" hard drive race at the moment.

For those considering to use SSD drive, we suggest you look at this article by AnandTech.

Test of Macbook air using the SSD drive DOES NOT gives you better battery life compared to Hitachi's 5k250. So the only realy advantage with SSD is the stock tolerance compared to mechanical hard disk. (That is if have thousands of spare money to waste on a SSD......)

Not convinced and want to see more evidence? See the Flash SSD update article by Tom's hardware.

"The conclusion, however, that Flash SSDs are often misleadingly presented as energy savers to increase your battery mileage on notebooks, is not invalidated. The truth is that more and more Flash SSDs will be increasingly efficient. But many conventional hard drives can also be more efficient than today’s Flash SSDs in the scenarios some of you were demanding: when providing data under a defined workload such as video playback or in idle until the notebook battery runs empty."

Feel free to challenge our conclusion and discuss in our forum.