Power Comparison

While hard drive manufacturers have been producing 5400 RPM notebook hard drives for years and even 7200 RPM hard drives in this form factor, many companies still insist on using slow 4200 RPM hard drives. Their reason? Faster hard drives consume more power and reduce battery life.

Even when we asked local retailers for faster 2.5" hard drives, we get snorts of derision. Why? According to them, faster hard drives suck up power like there's no tomorrow. You don't want that in your notebook, son.

Because 2.5" hard drives are designed for notebooks and mobile devices like MP3 players, their power consumption is an important consideration. Hard disks that use more power will certainly reduce the limited battery life of those devices.

But are claims that faster hard drives consume more power really true in the first place? Let's find out.

Let's compare the power consumption of the two hard drives we tested in this review - the Seagate 160GB Momentus 5400.2 and the Fujitsu 40GB MHT2040AT.

As you can see, the faster Momentus actually consumes LESS power than the Fujitsu MHT2040AT during reads and writes! It only consumes more power when it's idling. That could be due to the much larger SDRAM buffer used in the Momentus hard drive.

Therefore, it is not true that using a faster hard drive will definitely reduce your notebook's battery life. The faster spindle speed does not necessarily mean the hard drive will require more power.

So, do not be afraid to use faster hard drives in notebooks. It's more than about time for notebooks to enjoy much better hard drive performance. And you don't even have to worry about reduced battery life. Yes, you can have your cake and eat it too!