[Liverpool] SSD's and energy efficiency

[Sebastian]

I don't know if others here will find this interesting, but here it 
goes. I've been looking into the possibility of installing an SSD drive 
in my laptop in order to stretch the battery life as far as possible. 
Aside from well known performance improvements (which are not that 
important to me in this particular circumstance) - I have always been 
under the impression that a SSD drive, with no spinning platter, and 
chips which only consume power when doing work - should make a major 
contribution to extending the battery life.

To my surprise, I found out that the issue has been under (relatively) 
hot dispute since 2008, when Tom's Hardware published an article on this 
subject, which showed that SSD's vary from being worse energy performers 
then some 2.5 inch HDD's to being just mildly better - depending on 
model and type of workload.

Here is the article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html


And here is a counter article, from Laptopmag - which seems to show that 
in the right circumstances (possibly moving from a very inefficient hdd 
to a very efficient ssd?) there could be gains of up to 10 minutes in 
battery life:

http://blog.laptopmag.com/web-surfing-test-shows-ssds-better-for-battery-life

Hopefully things have improved since 2008 - and maybe there are more 
efficient SSD's around. However, looking at the power consumption specs 
of current SSD's on offer - I doubt - they still seem quite high.

I would be curious if anybody has stumbled over more recent in-depth 
articles/material on the subject.

I personally think I'll give up on the SSD idea for the moment being, 
and just look for a very power efficient hdd instead. And maybe spend 
the extra money on another 1-2 batteries for my laptop :-)

Any comments welcome,

Sebastian