Tom’s Hardware has been running some tests to challenge the
common assumption that SSD hard drives use power more
efficiently than magnetic plate drives. Their results were quite
definitive: not only are they not as energy efficient, SSDs
actually use more power than conventional hard drives. What they
found is that most plate drives are at peak consumption (up to
4W) when accessing files fragmented across the media, which
causes the actuator to move back and forth across the media
several times. However, this is almost never sustained for
extended periods of time; the actuator usually doesn’t move much
when reading unfragmented data, and most plate drives are also
capable of going idle when they are not in use. Most SSDs on the
other hand, only have two states: on and off. This means that
when they are on, they are always at peak energy consumption.
Though this number hovers around 2W for most of the SSDs they
tested, over prolonged periods this can mean a great deal more
power consumption than is immediatel