What's with the expansion cards and battery impact?

  • USB-C are pass-through so should not be draining any extra power.
  • USB-A keeps some subsystems on the mainboard powered on so it does contribute to some extra drain. (source)
  • The storage expansion cards use NAND flash so they are more like really fast flash drives.
  • Don’t know of any measurements off-hand, but I would assume the storage card consumes more power than the internal NVMe drive.

For a general idea of total impact on battery life the cards have, my setup (1C, 2A, 1HDMI) drains at 1.2 Wh higher during standby than with just 1C, which is about 2% battery drain per hour.

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