Tom’s Hardware: Flash SSDs Don’t Improve Your Notebook Battery Runtime

I missed this article from Tom’s Hardware last week:

We’ve looked at almost a dozen different flash SSDs from seven vendors over the last few months, and measured acceptable or sometimes even disappointing power requirements with most flash SSDs. In an effort to determine the actual impact on notebook systems, we took four SSDs that we had available in our test lab, and ran a series of Mobilemark benchmark runs on a Dell Latitude D630 notebook. We found runtime differences of up to one hour (!) when using a flash SSD compared to a high-performance 7,200 RPM 2.5-inch notebook hard drive.

Has anyone run battery life benchmarks comparing SSD- and hard drive-equipped MacBook Airs?

★ Wednesday, 9 July 2008