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I'm trying to come up with a case for replacing our laptop HDDs with SSDs in our IT dept. Besides saving a lot of developer time, is there any data out there to support my argument that they are more environmentally friendly? Esp. with regard to construction and power consumption. Can you think of any thing that I'm missing?

Update1: I am routinely slowed down by my HDD. I'm on a laptop so my swap file is sitting on a 5400 rpm hdd. I typically sit at 80% memory used when developing so I hit the swap a lot. I have the option of going to a 64b OS (minimal gain really, considering I only have 1 mem slot free) or upgrading to an SSD. So I'm losing time already all the time. So assuming I will replace the drives, is there an environmental bonus over the long term to replacing the drive?

Update2: What about power over a year? How much power would a laptop consume being used 40 hours a week and hitting the swap very frequently on a HDD vs. SSD?

Tamara Wijsman
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jcollum
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2 Answers2

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No; they don't save (as much) power as you might expect. See Tom's Hardware's analysis on SSD vs. HD power specifically this page. At least for laptops under Windows.

Update 12/2011: "A disk-based drive will always consume more power absolutely. At the system level, an SSD increases power consumption because CPU and memory utilization rises in response to increased I/O activity (they're not sitting there, waiting on a hard drive to send data)".

Brian Carlton
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If you are hitting swap, then I would suggest the SSD. But that is an expensive endeavorer and is a tough case to take on. SSDs are very expensive and only provide benefits through speeding up the page file and compiling time. The rest of the time, the benefits sit idle.

The best alternative is an actual workstation, with a bigger monitor. The bigger monitor is probably the best productivity boost you'll get and desktops are just faster overall.

surfasb
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