The Crucial/Micron M500 Review (960GB, 480GB, 240GB, 120GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 9, 2013 9:59 AM ESTPower Consumption
The M500 supports the new Device Sleep standard which will see platform support with Haswell this year. Crucial claims DIPM enabled idle power as low as 80mW, however even with DIPM enabled on our testbed we weren't able to get anything south of ~1W at idle. I'm digging to see if this is a M500 issue or one specific to our testbed, but Crucial is confident that in a notebook you'd see very little idle power consumption with the M500. Supporting DevSleep is important as that'll quickly become a must have feature for Haswell notebooks.
Load power looks excellent, which gives me hope that Crucial's idle power is indeed as good as they claim. The M500 is a direct competitor to Samsung's SSD 840 Pro when it comes to power consumption under load. Given how power efficient the 840 Pro is, the M500 is in good company.
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blackmagnum - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
How times have changed. SSDs now have better bang-for-the-buck than hard disk drives. No noise, low power, shock resistance... the works.Flunk - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
That's not quantitatively true. 2TB hard drives are available for about $100 which is 0.05/GB no SSD can match that.SSDs have better power usage, performance, shock resistance but they lag in capacity.
ABR - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
Actually they tend NOT to have better power usage, at least when compared against 2.5" laptop hard drives. But everyone thinks they do anyway since it just seems like a purely electronic device should use less energy than a mechanical one.akedia - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
I don't believe that's correct. Sure, sometimes, some SSDs in some usage scenarios might use more, but it's generally correct that SSDs use less power than even 2.5" HDDs. Below I've linked to recent (within the last year) StorageReview.com reviews for two current generation examples, the WD Scorpio Blue and the Samsung 840 Pro. The SSD beats the SSD on all measures other than writing, which over the course of time is unlikely to tip the scales, and even then they have to note that the system was tested in a desktop which didn't have DIPM enabled. So this is a worst-case for the SSD, without all of its power-saving features enabled, and it still comes out generally on top, while providing vastly superior performance on all measures.It's not true that ALL SSDs beat ALL HDDs at ALL times for ALL usages in ALL circumstances, but it's also not true that 2.5" HDDs have better power usage in general. They don't. And that's without even considering how much less time such a higher performing device would take to read or write a given amount of data, spending much less time out of power-sipping idle. Cheers.
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_scorp...
http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_ssd_840_pro_r...
akedia - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
*editThe SSD beats the HDD on all measures other than writing, it doesn't beat itself. *facepalm*
ABR - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
The SSD link you site, together with another review on Tom's Hardware, reportvery different values for power usage than most places I've seen. For example,
here on Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6328/samsung-ssd-840...
Generally averaging 3-5 watts, whereas good HDDs are in the 1.5-2.5 range. It would be good to know the reason for the discrepancies. It does seem that smaller processes are starting to help the SSDs catch up though.
tfranzese - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
You do realize that SSD's can get their work done quicker and get back to idle much faster than any mechanical drive? Unless you're looking at a SSD that has horrible idle power characteristics there's little hope in hell for a HDD to compete as far as power efficiency goes.ABR - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
What I realize is that there is a lot of hand-waving and warm fuzzy thinking in this area, but few hard numbers. The ones that I *have* seen tend to suggest SSDs are still catching up in power efficiency.MrSpadge - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
+1Consuming about as much power (give or take a few 10%) for one or two orders of magnitude less task completion time results in one to two orders of magnitude less energy consumed to complete the task. And that's what really counts, for the wallet and the battery.
mayankleoboy1 - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - link
Instead of "Power usage" , lets see the "Energy usage" of the whole system, (that is powerused*time)I strongly suspect that SSD's will easily beat any HDD here.