Best Nvme SSD with best power efficiency for laptops?

[davidm71]

Hi,

Use to have a Dell XPS 9343 and use to get about 5-6 hours battery life however last year since I gutted and replaced the inside with 9350 parts for NVME support I now get 3 hrs at best. Using a Samsung SM961 512gb drive and want to replace it with something less power hungry. Looking at either a Sabrant Rocket, Kingston KC2500, or a MydigitalSSD SBX Pro. So wonder which one would be better?

Should note that the power issues also come from going from 8gb ram to 16gb and from an i5 to an i7 plus the HD 4K screen doesn’t help. Tried upgrading the battery from 52 to 56 watt hour battery but still battery life sucks.

Thanks

 

[tabascosauz]

Hi,

Use to have a Dell XPS 9343 and use to get about 5-6 hours battery life however last year since I gutted and replaced the inside with 9350 parts for NVME support I now get 3 hrs at best. Using a Samsung SM961 512gb drive and want to replace it with something less power hungry. Looking at either a Sabrant Rocket, Kingston KC2500, or a MydigitalSSD SBX Pro. So wonder which one would be better?

Should note that the power issues also come from going from 8gb ram to 16gb and from an i5 to an i7 plus the HD 4K screen doesn’t help. Tried upgrading the battery from 52 to 56 watt hour battery but still battery life sucks.

Thanks

The WD SN750 pretty much always tops the charts in power efficiency and by quite the margin. But otherwise, it's an average performing 3D TLC drive, and isn't priced as a budget drive. Quite honestly, most of these bigger brand name drives have optimizations for lower power idle in laptops, so unless you're like AT and run debilitatingly heavy SSD benchmarks 24/7/365, none of them are going to chop your battery life in half.

I have a SN750 in my 9370 and have no complaints. I'm not familiar with the SBX Pro, only the outdated SBX, which was a DRAM-equipped drive. The Sabrent Rocket is highly rated, but is a DRAMless drive which means lower performance generally.

Go with what you want, generally, as long as experienced reviewers don't say there's anything seriously wrong with it. My OEM drive was the PM981, by all accounts the fastest all-around 3D TLC drive ever, and essentially downgrading to a bigger but slower SN750 I didn't notice any loss of performance. I'd take the WD SN550 if you don't want to break the bank, honestly; it sips power pretty conservatively and has solid performance for a DRAMless drive.

Simply having the 4K screen in a XPS 13 is straight up gutting your battery life. The choice of drive is much less important.

 

[Vya Domus]

Use to have a Dell XPS 9343 and use to get about 5-6 hours battery life however last year since I gutted and replaced the inside with 9350 parts for NVME support I now get 3 hrs at best.

That sounds really odd, I highly doubt a drive can literally halve your battery life. In fact there is no way it's anything but negligible, I think you'll be wasting your money trying to find a drive with better efficiency, it just wont matter.

 

[Mussels]

Yeah these NVME drives are extremely low power consumption, its not the cause of your reduced battery life

you can get cooler running ones for less heat, but these are damned low power usage devices

 

[davidm71]

Thanks guys for the comments. Reason I believe the nvme drive is responsible at least partially is because of accounts of others I have read of others that have experienced the same thing. Also read reviews on the 9350 that criticized its poor battery performance despite Dells claims to the contrary. Then there’s the heat I feel coming from the underside. It’s really hot at times. I had to placed a thermal pad to keep the drive cool or cooler. Going to buy something this weekend. Got nothing to lose. Thanks.

 

[tabascosauz]

Thanks guys for the comments. Reason I believe the nvme drive is responsible at least partially is because of accounts of others I have read of others that have experienced the same thing. Also read reviews on the 9350 that criticized its poor battery performance despite Dells claims to the contrary. Then there’s the heat I feel coming from the underside. It’s really hot at times. I had to placed a thermal pad to keep the drive cool or cooler. Going to buy something this weekend. Got nothing to lose. Thanks.

Again, unless you make a living off benchmarking drives all day, that's not the SSD you're feeling. That's heat from the CPU and its surrounding components. Slower NVMes simply don't even draw that much power. You need to check your power and performance options, get a monitoring program to monitor the temperatures you're seeing from that CPU on a daily basis, then decide whether it's appropriate to explore Throttlestop or XTU to undervolt / reduce power limits of your CPU.

My 9370 has a 8550U that has twice the core count, thread count and significantly higher turbo max speeds than your 6560U, and with undervolting in Throttlestop when I'm using Windows or intel-undervolt when I'm in Kubuntu, the body and chassis bottom is cool to the touch in daily usage. Use HWInfo running in the background to see how your CPU is boosting / drawing power / temps, and make sure both C-states and Speedshift are enabled in BIOS.

You're just speculating on how hot the drive is unless you actually fire up a monitoring program and leave it to record the max temperatures experienced by your drive. Mine just has a thin sheet of aluminium that gets pasted atop the drive, and it stays almost as cool as the NVMe in my desktop.

 

[davidm71]

Again, unless you make a living off benchmarking drives all day, that's not the SSD you're feeling. That's heat from the CPU and its surrounding components. Slower NVMes simply don't even draw that much power. You need to check your power and performance options, get a monitoring program to monitor the temperatures you're seeing from that CPU on a daily basis, then decide whether it's appropriate to explore Throttlestop or XTU to undervolt / reduce power limits of your CPU.

My 9370 has a 8550U that has twice the core count, thread count and significantly higher turbo max speeds than your 6560U, and with undervolting in Throttlestop when I'm using Windows or intel-undervolt when I'm in Kubuntu, the body and chassis bottom is cool to the touch in daily usage. Use HWInfo running in the background to see how your CPU is boosting / drawing power / temps, and make sure both C-states and Speedshift are enabled in BIOS.

You're just speculating on how hot the drive is unless you actually fire up a monitoring program and leave it to record the max temperatures experienced by your drive. Mine just has a thin sheet of aluminium that gets pasted atop the drive, and it stays almost as cool as the NVMe in my desktop.

I have been using Coretemp to monitor temps and core utilization percentages and noticed that the i6560u cpu was running hot. Like 80-90 degrees hot. I replaced the TIM twice and even bought a new heatsink just in case my original heatsink might have gotten a kink in it so I replaced it and placed Grizly Thermal pads on its backside and got the temps to drop probably 10 -15 degrees. Never the less because its only a dual core cpu most of the time I have noticed the cpu near 90 -100 % loaded. Going to check bios to see if C-states and Speedshift are enabled, and investigate Throttlestop.

Thanks.

 

[elemkay]

Thanks guys for the comments. Reason I believe the nvme drive is responsible at least partially is because of accounts of others I have read of others that have experienced the same thing. Also read reviews on the 9350 that criticized its poor battery performance despite Dells claims to the contrary. Then there’s the heat I feel coming from the underside. It’s really hot at times. I had to placed a thermal pad to keep the drive cool or cooler. Going to buy something this weekend. Got nothing to lose. Thanks.

You're not going insane. It's remarkable in 2020 how it seems no-one is aware of the huge difference in battery life that drives will give you on your laptop, regardless of them having low power states available. The controller and the type of NAND used will both have a massive impact on how much power the drive draws.

This is a massive list of different SSDs and their respective battery life in laptops as reviewed by Chris Ramsayer for Tweaktown: https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8856/best-ssds-notebooks-two-year-study/index3.html

As you can see, with a roughly 7 hour top score, the difference between average drives is about an hour, and to the very worst drives can be as much as two. When you stretch that out to a laptop that has a battery life of 12 hours, that difference can be pretty huge. And those tests are performed with continuous usage. If the drive has certain weaknesses in terms of returning to its' low power state when your laptop is idle, then you could be looking at your battery life being utterly decimated.

OEM Samsung drives tend to be at the head of the field when it comes to NVME, with certain drives being much better than others. The true battery life king is the SATA 3 Samsung 850 EVO version 2, with 48 layer NAND instead of the original 32, and it sips power like nothing else. Any laptop I've put it in has seen an extension of 1-2 hours battery life over the previous SSD. I would take 550mb read/write speed with a big bump in battery life any day of the week. Literally no difference whatsoever in real world use, unless you're copying large files constantly or working with video editing. Even boot speed depends more on the firmware of the laptop, and the amount of software loaded at startup on Windows, than the speed of the drive inside.

Yeah these NVME drives are extremely low power consumption, its not the cause of your reduced battery life

you can get cooler running ones for less heat, but these are damned low power usage devices

Not all NVME SSDs are made equal.

That sounds really odd, I highly doubt a drive can literally halve your battery life. In fact there is no way it's anything but negligible, I think you'll be wasting your money trying to find a drive with better efficiency, it just wont matter.

Like I say, I find it remarkable how nobody seems to know how much impact an SSD can have on battery life, and I would like to see that change.

 

[davidm71]

Well after using Throttlestop for last few weeks and dropping cpu volts by 40mv had a random BSOD. Not sure why but could have been from Throttlestop.

Also read that using the built in Microsoft NVME driver instead of Samsung can help with battery life. May attempt to roll back to MS driver but will have to backup system first.
Not sure correct way to change the driver safely.

Thanks

 

[elemkay]

Well after using Throttlestop for last few weeks and dropping cpu volts by 40mv had a random BSOD. Not sure why but could have been from Throttlestop.

Also read that using the built in Microsoft NVME driver instead of Samsung can help with battery life. May attempt to roll back to MS driver but will have to backup system first.
Not sure correct way to change the driver safely.

Thanks

Go to Device Manager and you should be able to find the NVME driver tucked away somewhere. Uninstall it, restart and it will automatically revert to the Microsoft driver. Yes, the reviewers did tests with the generic and the Samsung drivers, and the Samsung ones gave terrible battery life in comparison. I'm sure they were made for optimal performance in systems, with no consideration to battery life given.

But that means you're using either the Samsung 960/970 drives, and actually they have bad power consumption when compared with other Samsung OEM drives, even with the default Microsoft driver.
Ironically, the 1TB version of the drive you had, the SM961, tops the chart with battery life for 1TB drives. It scored 20 minutes longer than the 512GB version. If you want the most power efficient drive, that's the one to get.

 

[davidm71]

Go to Device Manager and you should be able to find the NVME driver tucked away somewhere. Uninstall it, restart and it will automatically revert to the Microsoft driver. Yes, the reviewers did tests with the generic and the Samsung drivers, and the Samsung ones gave terrible battery life in comparison. I'm sure they were made for optimal performance in systems, with no consideration to battery life given.

But that means you're using either the Samsung 960/970 drives, and actually they have bad power consumption when compared with other Samsung OEM drives, even with the default Microsoft driver.
Ironically, the 1TB version of the drive you had, the SM961, tops the chart with battery life for 1TB drives. It scored 20 minutes longer than the 512GB version. If you want the most power efficient drive, that's the one to get.

Well its easier just to uninstall the driver. Don't need extra performance on a laptop with a 2X lane spec and two pci-e lanes disabled!

But it doesn't make sense the 1TB drive be better battery performer. Maybe firmwares were different.

 

[jitendrad]

WD SN750 for me !!!

 

[davidm71]

Well finally replaced the SM961 with a SK Hynix P31 Gold. The reviews I read claimed it had the best power efficiency out of any NVME drive out there.
Installed it last night. Still too early to tell if there are any improvements to battery life. Will be a subjective test at best. Worthy to note the underside of
the notebook doesn't feel as hot!

BTW got bluescreen with Throttlestop running a 0.6 v reduction so stopped using it.

 

[tabascosauz]

Yeah, the P31 is the new king of efficiency, it's just hard to find in places. The SN750 is really nice but I would have gotten the P31 had it come earlier and been available.

0.6V is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much undervolt, did you mean -0.06V? There's a lot of ins and outs to using TS, but I can tell you confidently that the program doesn't cause instability, it's your settings that are too aggressive and need to be adjusted. Generally on Kaby and newer it's the cache that becomes unstable first around the -0.1V mark whereas the core can keep undervolting further (though it might not make a performance difference).

 

[davidm71]

I don't remember what was the voltage change. Will have to check. Either way I'm dropping it in half. Thanks.

 

[tpu_user]

Looking at idle power consumption for different SSDs from some a couple review sites, there can be a difference of several watts over 10 hours. With a 60Wh battery, which is about average, that means over 10 hours you'll drain an extra ~10-12% of the battery's capacity, so if it would last 10 hours with one drive, it might only last 9 with another. That's a pretty significant difference.

Something else to keep in mind is that even if the SSD itself isn't making a big difference, one that runs hotter will require more cooling, and fans definitely use a lot of power.

 

[elemkay]

Well finally replaced the SM961 with a SK Hynix P31 Gold. The reviews I read claimed it had the best power efficiency out of any NVME drive out there.
Installed it last night. Still too early to tell if there are any improvements to battery life. Will be a subjective test at best. Worthy to note the underside of
the notebook doesn't feel as hot!

That's a good sign on the heat front. However, it should be said that reviews always talk about efficiency regarding power consumed when active and idle - yet something Chris Ramsayser said who wrote this: https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8856/best-ssds-notebooks-two-year-study/index.html , was that one of the biggest factors in laptop battery was how the SSDs handle background garbage collection, and that's something only real world testing of laptop battery life can reflect. He now works for Phison, so he knows what he is talking about.

Did the drive end up giving you better battery life than the SM961?

 

[THEBOSS619]

I believe when power consumption is lower then heat output should be lower as well and hence why SK Hynix P31 Gold got the crown for this category of the most power efficient SSD on the market currently.

 

[tpu_user]

I believe when power consumption is lower then heat output should be lower as well and hence why SK Hynix P31 Gold got the crown for this category of the most power efficient SSD on the market currently.

I looked at it briefly before, but really wanted 2TB and it doesn't come in that capacity, so I didn't seriously look into it, and was leaning toward the SN750, since that and the 970 are the only ones that are single-sided in 2TB. But I'm not going to pay what they want for it (WD is really asking too much for what it is and needs to get more realistic about their pricing), so I was then considering the 1TB version. But your comment made me take another look at the P31, since that becomes an option if I go with 1TB, and I have to say I'm extremely impressed. Looking at multiple reviews, it pretty consistently outperforms the SN750 in most metrics, typically by a pretty wide margin, as well as the 970 and others. In most benchmarks, it's one of the top performers, and even though the SN750, 970, and others do better than it here and there, overall it beats them both and just about everything else, and it's far, far superior in efficiency. So not only is it as fast or, most often, faster in most cases, it uses far less power in the process and seems to run slightly cooler. The temp difference doesn't appear to be very dramatic, but every little bit helps. And the price, especially right now, is amazing. I just wish there was a 2TB version, and I'd easily pay $300 for it, but right now I'm almost certainly going to get the 1TB version of it and upgrade to 2TB once they release it and the price is right.

 

[Athlonite]

bang for buck size vs price and read/write speeds I'd go for a Adata XPG SX8200pro 1TB or 2TB nVME SSD

 

[davidm71]

I'm sorry to reply late but my subjective feelings are that I got another hour of battery life. Usually the power meter would drip away minutes fast but this time it was a lot more gradual and felt like it took longer to de-charge. One thing to note is that I'm not using Chrome that much on my laptop and its well known how much Chrome loves to drink battery power away. In anycase not concerned so much regarding performance as my laptop maxes out past 1500 mb/s (only has two pci-e lanes).