ssd for battery life

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NorthboundOcclusive

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okay so ive got this lenovo g500 laptop with a 500gb 5400rpm harddrive.
i have a couple really long plane trips comming up (actual in-air time plus layovers) so i want to boost my battery life. im already looking to get a second battery, one with higher capacity than the stock battery, but i wanna throw in a ssd as well (because why not).

my general idea is to use clonezilla to move the win8.1 partition plus lenovo's disk recovery partition (because no installation media for it) to the new drive, so i'll need something of equal or greater size, a 512gb ssd in this case.(anything bigger would be too expensive anyway, anything smaller and there wouldnt be enough space...unless i resized both partitions down to the bare minimum first? would be about 150&5gb each), and then use HDD as an external storage drive

i dont need a blazing fast SSD, im looking for cheap, with very good battery life. i dont do much gaming on the laptop, its mostly movies, music and web. im thinking about picking up another crucial mx500 (unless the new BX models are better for battery life?), or does someone have a better suggestion?
 
Watch for a sale. The 1TB Crucial M500 was $285 yesterday at newegg and I have seen similar 500GB models for under $200 recently.
 
Arconis True Image will allow you to image from a larger partition to a smaller one aslong as the smaller one has enough space for the data.

I got my copy when I purchased an SSD a couple years ago. Maybe that is still an option?

not really sure how much extra battery life it will give you though? (i'm by far an expert at such things)
 
As much as I like SSDs, I don't know that you will see a huge change in battery life.

This was an early claim on SSDs- and they are for the most part pretty low power (<1W typically, with latest generation being <0.2W typically).

That being said, HDDs for laptops are also pretty energy efficient. Most are <2W running, and with power management software, typically are sleeping most of the time. Some particlar SSDs can draw more power than a typical HDD.

But all in all, the difference isn't that big. The Crucial MX500 looks like a decent SSD power-wise (0.150W running, <0.015W idle on spec sheet, didn't see any benchmark measurements). So I don't know that you would get much in terms of measurable battery difference, at least under anything but a synthetic battery life test that could get you repeatable numbers to compare.

There are plenty of other excellent reasons to put an SSD into a laptop, but battery life, I don't know that that particular reason is necessarily true.

I found this article somewhat interesting:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1226363
 
It depends on what hard drive that you already have. I had a 7200 RPM Western Digital Black in my laptop when I switched it over to an SSD. It made my battery life go from 4 hours to about 4 and a half-5, depending. If you have a 5400 RPM drive, you'll probably see less gains.

Pretty much any SSD will be fast enough for what you want to use it for. Acronis should allow you to copy from a large partition to a smaller one.
 
something to start with i guess.

did a bit more digging and looks like the HDD (western digital wd5000lpvt-24g33t1) is only sata II, rather than III, which im sure would eat into the ssd's performance


i had a code for a free copy of true image (or something similar) that came with my current ssd, but i have no idea what i did with it =(

still more digging suggests a method of editing a file created by windows' own recovery drive to adjust the (re)created partition sizes so it doesnt flip out in going to a smaller drive from a larger one
 
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NorthboundOcclusive said:
did a bit more digging and looks like the HDD (western digital wd5000lpvt-24g33t1) is only sata II, rather than III, which im sure would eat into the ssd's performance
Click to expand...
The current HDD's interface has nothing to do with the interface on the laptop. SATA III is backwards compatible with I, and II. You need to look at the interface coming from the laptop's chipset.

Even if the laptop doesn't have SATA III, it won't hinder an SSD as much as you might think. It will still be hella fast. Sure, an SSD will be bottlenecked by SATA II, but a 5400rpm 2.5 inch drive can't even come close to saturating that connection.

It's the equivalent of a comparing a 50cc moped to a sports car that can't quite hit its top speed because it needs an extra gear in the transmission.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
The current HDD's interface has nothing to do with the interface on the laptop. SATA III is backwards compatible with I, and II. You need to look at the interface coming from the laptop's chipset.

Even if the laptop doesn't have SATA III, it won't hinder an SSD as much as you might think. It will still be hella fast. Sure, an SSD will be bottlenecked by SATA II, but a 5400rpm 2.5 inch drive can't even come close to saturating that connection.

It's the equivalent of a comparing a 50cc moped to a sports car that can't quite hit its top speed because it needs an extra gear in the transmission.
Click to expand...

Especially when all you're doing is pretty much 0-100 sprints (random read/writes). You're not racing in a straight line at 150+ mph (sequential read/writes).
 
As someone who travels an insane amount, buy yourself an airline power adapter regardless of what equipment you eventually get. Kensington and others make great units with plug-in tips for just about every piece of portable entertainment/computing equipment out there.
 
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