I've heard that apart from straight-up speed, SSDs greatly outperform HDDs in power consumption and heat generation. How much greater, on average, is an SSD than an HDD in:
- Power consumption.
- Heat generation.
Is there a very significant difference?
Apart from speed, how do SSDs compare to HDDs
hard drivessd
Related Solutions
Actually, there's a much simpler solution.
Windows Drive Optimizer (formerly Disk Defragmenter) reports whether a drive is an HDD or SSD. You can access this utility by pressing Windows+S, searching for "optimize", and selecting Defragment and optimize your drives.
This will generally work in any system where the disks are not plugged into a RAID card. However, if the OS cannot determine the media type (e.g. the drives are in a hardware RAID), the above solution won't work, although a program such as CrystalDiskInfo may still be able to help. If you still can't tell whether the drive(s) is an HDD or SSD, you may need to open the computer case and examine the actual drive(s).
Alternatively, you can use the PowerShell Get-PhysicalDisk cmdlet. Here's what it looks like on my custom desktop:
PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-PhysicalDisk | select FriendlyName,BusType,MediaType
FriendlyName BusType MediaType
------------ ------- ---------
NVMe Samsung SSD 960 NVMe SSD
SanDisk SDSSDH31024G SATA SSD
Your solution here is to measure the power. I can see two ways to achieve that.
- Make up a USB breakout cable that you can use with your digital multi-meter to measure the voltage and current supplied from the USB port to the external drive.
- Purchase one of the inexpensive USB test meters that displays voltage and current for you. One example of these meters can be seen here on Amazon.
Once you have voltage in Volts and current in Amps just multiply the two numbers together to get power in Watts.
Best Answer
There is a considerable difference in power consumption, I've seen different data on that, but its ~0.6W as opposed to ~2.2W.
One thing to keep in mind- because there is no queuing delay, the processor utilization will go up, and that will create a lot more heat. A buddy of mine says that there are times where his laptop actually gets hotter after doing that upgrade for that reason. I'm sure that only happens when he's really reading/writing a ton of data!