Hard disk impact on laptop battery life

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GJones
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Joined: 22. Jul 2011, 23:27

Hard disk impact on laptop battery life

Post by GJones »

I recently replaced the broken hard drive in my main laptop (HP dv6000 series) with a newish 320 GB Samsung model. To my surprise, I found that the laptop's estimated battery life had increased by about an hour following the replacement - from a little under two hours to a little under three.

Are some of the new laptop HDDs that much more efficient? Or is the laptop's ACPI being fooled somehow?
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gapan
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Joined: 6. Jun 2009, 17:40

Re: Hard disk impact on laptop battery life

Post by gapan »

It's probably a more efficient hard drive. Bigger cache means less access means extended battery life. Plus, being a newly formatted hard drive, means it has no fragmentation problem at all, so less spinnig back and forth. Linux filesystems in general are very tolerant to fragmentation but if your old hard drive was almost full, fragmentation could have been an issue.
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