SSD and 2.5" HD: Fight about Power Consumption

Couple of days ago, Tom's Hardware ignite fire by publish a test aiming to compare power consumption of SSD vs. 2.5”HD. Surprisingly, and against all claims published by HD manufacturers, Tom’s found that SSDs use more power than traditional notebook HD. Several readers and websites quickly question the test procedure used by Tom’s while pointing out to some serious flaws in testing. Tom’s Hardware ran a benchmark designed to keep the notebook active all time regardless of the performance level or amount of crunched data. As a result, the higher efficiency of SSDs was leading to slight higher power consumption. Indeed tom’s test did not take into account the fact that with such SSDs most task and/or request will be performed faster than from a traditional HD, so requiring less disk usage.
By using a website-based test procedure, blog.laptopmag.com nicely demonstrated that SSD provide longer battery life, but certainly not as long as one could have predicted it, or claimed it. In their test, 2 SSDs, one from SanDisk and the other from Samsung, lasted 10 minutes longer than the same laptop equipped with the default HD.
So, to conclude on that point, current SSD can drain more power than HD but this is mostly when heavily loaded, and as they will perform the task faster than traditional HD it should NOT translate in higher power consumption. However, unlike some SSD manufacturers could claim it too broadly, the real power saving value with SSD might well be with current SSD generation not that much different than with traditional 2.5”HD. However, in the future, improvement of power consumption of SSD will have much more room too improve than with the current standard plate-based 2.5” HDs.