Apples to Apples comparison. notebook hard drives & power usage question

Rings890 · Post by **Rings890** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 6:29 pm

This is in my 13" Mac Book Pro (new style). If I take a 320Gig 5400 RPM drive and replace it with a 1T 5400 RPM drive will this effect the power usage? Same brand of hard drives, just a larger size, I had switched to a 7200 but my battery life has been allmost cut in half, I know that the speed of the drive will effect the battery life but I am not sure about the acctual size using more power. I'm lost on this one.

Sava700 · Post by **Sava700** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 8:02 pm

It may use more power for a larger drive since it's turning more platters, maybe more than the 7200 RPM drive used. I would have stayed with the 7200 drive since it runs faster.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 8:41 pm

Hey Rings.....been a loooong long time!

You'll have to look deep in the detailed specs of the drives. Newer drives, even though larger, have been getting more and more power efficient. Also they have been getting more dense...as far as data being packed on the platters, and storing data vertically. So newer larger drives may actually still have just 1 platter...a more power efficient motor..and consume less juice. There are many "green" drives also.

Adding more RAM will help battery life of a laptop too....since it's not using swapfile/paging memory (on the hard drive) as much.

Rings890 · Post by **Rings890** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 11:24 pm

Hey! YeOldeStonecat, it has been a while. I sort of fell off the planet and forgot how to use the internet.
What I did was swap out my Hitachi 320 gig 5400 rpm drive for a WD Blue 1T 7200 rpm drive in my little 13" mac notebook. It cut my battery life from about 7hrs to 3. I was looking at the specs of the WD 1T 5400 rpm drive to see if there was any power saving advantage, the loss of battery life is a bit more than I want to deal with, the system also runs a bit hotter, not bad but you notice it now.