silicon pop culture!

After two of those horrible Hitachi hard drives died on me I decided to do the big upgrade and convert my PCG-TR3A to the Toshiba mounting and to install the Samsung 16GB SSD. Thanks to information gained on this forum the conversion was very easy and I found the Samsung 16GB SSD for $150 so I installed it. The performance increase was outstanding and worked much better than I expected but the computer developed a weird problem. After installing the SSD the battery life is now only about 30 minutes instead of about 2 hours when I had the Hitachi drive installed. Do any of you have any ideas about what may have caused this?

Well, a couple of things could be causing the problem:

1. SSD doesn’t not automatically mean better battery life. Recent tests have shown that some SSD drives actually consume more power than traditional hard disks due to the fact that they have a higher idle power draw. Do you have the specs on the drive you purchased?

2. The operating system and/or HDD may not be configured to use all of the possible power saving features. I assume you’re running XP.

From everything I’ve read the Samsung SSD has much better power consumption rates than hardrives.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/conventional-hard-drive-obsoletism,1324-5.html

The article from Toms Hardware was testing the 32GB 2.5 SSD but I dont think it would be that much different than the 16GB 1.8 SSD that I have. Also I had a dramtic decrease in battery life from 2 hours down to 30 minutes and I’ve read several forum postings from other people who have installed the Samsung and none of them report anything like this. I’m hoping that I’m seeing a coincedence in that the battery decided to die at the same time I installed the SSD.