Laptop Hard Drive Vs Desktop Hard Drive

[EternalRZ]

So this is just a random question but, do laptop hard drives consume less power than desktop hard drives? I'm only asking because I'm thinking of just buying brackets and swapping out all my desktop's hard drives with laptop hard drives. I would imagine that a laptop hard drive saves a lot of power, but hey I could be wrong, so I thought I'd ask for an outside opinion. Thanks!

 

[Petey7]

I don't believe that they use less power. Many laptop hard drives run at 5400 RPM, as opposed to 7200 RPM, which saves power but reduces performance, but you can also buy 5400 RPM desktop hard drives and 7200 RPM laptop hard drives. Your best bet to reduce power consumption and improve performance is to get a SSD. SSDs are much faster and use less power because they have no moving parts. It is recommended to still have a hard drive for storage, because larger SSDs are still expensive.

 

[EternalRZ]

Okay thanks haha. Yeah, I'm not taking the SSD route because I've got 4 hard drives in my computer. The price for all of that would be outrageous lol.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Hard drives use very little power regardless--under 10 watts, sometimes under 5. You wouldn't save much regardless of the type of spinning hard drive you had---as long as they were spinning. Putting them into a sleeping state would reduce it to a minimum.

 

[Petey7]

ignatzatsonic brings up a good point. Look at Power Options in control panel. You can set it to put hard drives in to a sleep state after a few minutes of not being used, which will save power.