Comments on: Web Surfing Test Shows SSDs Better for Battery Life

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:12:25 +0000

Tomshardware.com was critized for the same flawed type of SSD articles relating to battery comsumption just a few weeks ago and TOMs re-made another article about SSD power comsumption.

By: George

George — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:08:00 +0000

I would suggest a simple test: a laptop with wireless off, bluetooth off, sound off, and brightness to minimum. Then tun an antivirus check on all files. I do believe that SSDs will do this test quicker and with less power.

By: Glenn

Glenn — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:35:47 +0000

“Update: Bar graph reformatted to start at an X axis of 0:00. Previous version of graph showed same exact numbers, but was a “zoom in” that showed from 3:07 to 3:28.”

YES — thank you! That stuff drives me crazy; see Howard Duff’s classic “How to Lie With Statistics” for more info.

Most sites wouldn’t have bothered with the change, so THANK YOU for the extra effort!

By: Pat

Pat — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:56:30 +0000

This test doesn’t really use the hd/ssd at all. Repeat this test with your webbrowsing-script, but additionally simulate some HD access. I really mean “some” access! Not continuous access because that would be non-realistic. But barely no access at all isn’t representative either. This could be, like, play 3 minutes MP3 every 10 minutes, open/close/repeat a maybe 5mb big powerpoint presentation/word document, and so on.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:34:51 +0000

Test seems biased towards SSDs in multiple ways

By: Anon

Anon — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:35:43 +0000

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the disabled cache is helping out the SSDs? According to Tom’s Hardware, the SSDs are comparatively less efficient when reading and writing than when sitting idle, and disabling cache is keeping the drives idle. Under normal use, cache is enabled and users visit different sites, resulting in quite a bit of drive access that doesn’t occur in your test (since the website data is stored in RAM). I would enable cache, but force the browser to fully reload each page (Ctrl+F5) a certain percentage of the time to simulate caching page data to the drive.

Also, closing and reopening Firefox tests Vista’s ability to cache commonly used applications in RAM more than anything. Which drive was the first to be tested?

By: lee

lee — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:32:10 +0000

sure you not got it the other way round, the more disk access is better with SSD as thay perform better (ignoreing the cost side) then an hdd, more so when it comes to small files and vista does that alot (vista seems made for SSD)

for norm day to day stuff users not likey need SSD but if you got the money its nice to have one less thing that makes noise and heat and have speed, with all the tests and all if you used an SSD based computer programs and other things just respond faster and open faster

By: amadlopes

amadlopes — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:12:15 +0000

Both tests are ok. This tests a system with low charge and the other from Tom’s Hrdware tests a system with high charge. Choose form yourself. If you only use the system to webfurfing and other things that don’t too much the disks than buy it with ssd, if you use apps that use much the disk well than buy one iwth normal hard disk. This is like asking what computer do i have to buy ? We have to know first for what we need the computer.

By: Bandito

Bandito — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:45:30 +0000

It would be interesting to see the numbers just for curiosity’s sake. The HD and SanDisk should be pretty close if the run time difference is factored in, but I’d expect a bit of difference on the Samsung.

I guess that there are still many factors to consider, such as how much of the program is actually being read from the drive as opposed to being drawn from cache memory, the possibility that cache memory erases any real performance differences between the drives when writing the small log files, and the fact that the load time of the web pages will vary due to traffic load and network routing variations. It seems that something that appears to be simple starts to get complicated very quickly!

Still, it’d be nice to know what you got.

Thanks for providing a rebuttal to the Tom’s Hardware article. It didn’t seem to quite add up correctly to me either, with what I know of electronics and physics. The other thing they failed to mentioned was how they did the power measurements that they published. Granted, the specs on the fastest SSD drive showed it to be rather a power hog, but their conclusions were a bit presuming and too broadly generalized to all SSDs.

Thanks again!

By: netbsd

netbsd — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:27:57 +0000

It would be interesting to repeat the experiment using SDHC cards. You may recall that the Psion netBook only had a CF and PCMCIA slot, not a disk, solid state or otherwise.

Maybe a fast SDHC card is better than a slow SSD and many of us might as well buy cheaper (2 SDHC slots, no SSD) netbooks.