SSD hard drives tank laptop battery life

Here's the original article instead of the linked meta-babble.<p><a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.htm...</a><p>EDIT: After trying to read and understand the article, I'm beyond confused. According to the chart on<p><a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955-14.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955-14....</a><p>There are two SSDs that consume less power both idle and under load than the tested HDD. There's no summary data for actual battery life. I think they're trying to explain the disparity by saying the HDD spends more time idle. I really can't tell from all the verbose and confusing writing.

Agreed, the EEE (on which I write this) has surprisingly short battery life for such a limited device.<p>However, the SSD more than makes up for the battery consumption by being silent, blazingly fast and mad robust (this is my four year old son's computer and he can drop it on the floor while the disk is running without killing it).<p>I can't wait for SSDs to become standard.

We use Compact Flash as hdd's is small embedded systems. They are 10x more battery efficient than a standard laptop hdd and twice as efficient as a microdrive.<p>Of course, the largest CF we use is 8 GB and the typical size is 2-4 gb. (I did my consumption tests on 4GB Sandisks). The smallest used in the article was 32GB. Perhaps power consumption increases dramatically with size in SSD's?

I have an Asus EEE and the battery life is so-so, good enough for a decent train ride. When I installed software (lots of disk activity) while on battery, boy the battery went down quick.

The article seems to contradict itself.<p>Also, these are still pretty new, and their power efficiency (and prices, <i>ahem</i>) will no doubt improve over time.

Surely SSDs would also turn off and enter a power saving mode when not in use?