this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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Micron's new PCIe 5.0 SSD promises longer battery life (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 1 day ago by Alphane_Moon to c/hardware
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

Question: what kind of impact would this really have on the battery life of a standard laptop?

The article is suggesting it uses about 2-3 watts less power than older models, but that sounds like very little. Would this have any effect on the lifespan of the hard drive also? Are there other significant factors (like heat) that make this a noteworthy improvement?

Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate seeing computer parts trying to go for power efficiency and frankly I wish more companies would (namely GPU manufacturers), but a hard drive just seems like an odd choice to strive for low power draw at the cost of read/write speed.

[–] Alphane_Moon 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

This seems to be primarily aimed at PCI-E 5.0 SSD adoption in laptops, where every bit of power saving counts.

2-3 watts is not bad considering (desktop) PCI-E 5.0 SSDs seem to consume about 5-10 watts.

Lower power consumption would also reduce heat, albeit I have no clue about the overall impact.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

The back of my envelope says that if a 50Wh laptop battery gave you 5 hours of run time, an average of 10W, then reducing that to 7W whilst keeping everything else the same would give you just over 7 hours. But it likely wont be quite that much in practice because all the components are constantly changing their power requirements and my envelope has a corner torn off at that point.

[–] Alphane_Moon 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I don't have experience with laptop PCI-E 5.0 SSDs, but I don't think the desktop power consumption numbers (dynamic?) would map directly to laptop use cases. I.e. I highly doubt laptop PCI-E 5.0 SSDs consistently eat 5-10 watts during runtime. There would have to be some sort of power focused optimization routines. With desktops, you don't really need this.

I think the bigger goal is lowering power impact from PCI-E 5.0 SSDs on a relative basis. The focus seems to be on significant improvements in power consumption for relatively modest decrease in top speed capabilities; a trade-off that one could argue is a perfect fit for laptops.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I didn't know SSDs contained batteries. Lol

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

please tell me your joking

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, hence the "lol". I thought the article headline was worded oddly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago

phew. yeah I was not sure how to take the lol. I guess I did not see it as to odd as I see it pretty often with new cpu architecture and such so the precedent was sorta there.