We’ve looked at almost a dozen different flash SSDs from seven vendors over the last few months, and measured acceptable or sometimes even disappointing power requirements with most flash SSDs.

The results of our testing are a shock for anyone who cares about battery runtime, as our results prove unmistakably that battery runtimes do not increase when using flash based SSDs. As a matter of fact, most flash SSD products actually contribute to emptying your battery even faster! Mainstream flash SSDs — if they can even be called “mainstream” at prices of $500 and up — do not even provide convincing performance while they help to suck your battery empty quicker than before.

It seems to us that most of the flash SSD vendors never really tried replacing a mechanical drive with one of their flash SSD drives, or they would have found out what we discovered. Instead, most of them are plainly lying by telling the customer about better energy efficiency and potential improvements in battery runtime. I don’t want to point at anyone in particular, as this may have happened because most people aren’t aware of the true facts. Battery runtime may improve if systems run idle, but most of the time they don’t, and this is where the good old hard drive shines brighter than before