What's with the expansion cards and battery impact?

[anarcat]

I made detailed tests for this, you might like to read the results in:

[TRACKING] Test results for standby battery use of Expansion Cards

After first testing each expansion card’s power usage at runtime — part of my in-depth review — I have finally gone around doing a similar set of tests on standby. TL;DR: everything but USB-C take power, USB-A and DisplayPort take a lot more than they logically should. Here is a summary of those results. Device Wattage Amperage Days Note baseline 0.25W 16mA 9 sleep=deep nvme.noacpi=1 s2idle 0.29W 18.9mA ~7 sleep=s2idle nvme.noacpi=1 normal nvme 0.31W 20mA ~7 sleep=s2idle without…

@Passerilly

• USB-C and USB-A expansion cards are more complicated than just ports and (see above) drain power when not used?

USB-C cards use no power on suspend. USB-A do use power, and a surprising lot (300-500mW).

@Passerilly

• Are storage card expansion cards like thumb drives (USB flash drives) in the system or like hard drives?

I’m not sure I understand that question. The SSD expansion card is a SSD drive that connects over USB-C, so it’s more like a USB flash drive than a “real hard drive”, which would connect over SATA, SAS, or NVMe. That said, it should still be pretty fast. This might be worth discussing in a separate topic. See also:

• Storage Expansion Cards
• The Benchmark Thread - Storage Expansion Cards
• Does running an OS from an expansion card impact performance?
• and more: Search results for 'ssd card performance' - Framework Community

@Passerilly

What would be the preferred choice between a larger NVMe storage (say 1TB) or a smaller NVMe storage (say 250GB) with a 1TB storage drive?

It really depends on your use case. I picked the former; I already had my system on a 1TB NVMe card, and there was no way I was going back to smaller on that, for sure.

One key thing to keep in mind is that any expansion card plugged into your laptop will take power, at runtime or suspend (except the USB-C cards). So if you rely on the SSD expansion card, you will take a 250mW drain on suspend (10→5 days suspend, half!) and close to 2W at runtime (also doubling power usage).

So if you can afford the expense on the NVMe disk, do it.

@Passerilly

I’m either going to run 4 cards at the same time or walk around “naked”.

Some people have actually ordered 4 USB-C cards exactly for that reason:

@Jonathan_Walters

@Usernames

Yeah I would have also got all type C

ok, I’m gonna change my order

HTH!