It’s time to buy my SSD/RAM for my 13, and have been reading reviews. Was wondering if a more efficient SSD has made any real world difference in your battery life.
For my use case this will be a Gen4 2/4TB TLC drive with a DRAM cache.
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With ASPM enabled (most probably the case on any mobile setup), idle power draw won’t really matter. When it comes to efficiency during operation, the answer is of course “it depends”. If you’re planning to do really disk-heavy stuff (e.g., editing 4K videos, just copying terabytes everyday for fun, etc.) this will absolutely be a factor, and it should arguably be at the top of your list of criteria. However, if (like most users) you won’t be dealing with particularly heavy disk loads, it shouldn’t matter too much. Of course, when we talk about extremely high or extremely low efficiency SSDs, there will be differences, but most products in the market (from known brands) will perform similarly given a typical OS and productivity workload with occasional bursts of large operations (e.g., installing software, downloading media libraries) sprinkled in.
You mention that you’ll specifically be going for a Gen 4 drive with cache. Obviously, Gen 3 drives and/or cacheless drives will consume less power. Looking at it from this angle, we go back to the same question: How heavy are the disk loads going to be? It might not be too silly to consider a Gen 3 drive. I opted for a P31 because I knew I wasn’t going to do anything too crazy from a disk load perspective. I wanted the cache, but I can also imagine someone who suspects that their drive won’t be close to capacity might go for a cacheless drive with HMB, as those are honestly getting pretty good too.
Finally, bear in mind that high efficiency at Gen 4 speeds sometimes comes at the cost of thermal performance. For instance, the P44, as efficient as it is, runs pretty hot, especially compared to its incredibly cool Gen 3 predecessor the P31. This could be another factor you might want to take into account, given that we’re dealing with a laptop here.
tl;dr: If you don’t expect particularly heavy disk loads, not really. If you do, yes.
Hope this helps! I also found some more discussion in this thread.
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