SSD, etc. impact on battery life for a high-end laptop

My current workhorse is an HP dv6000 series laptop. Nice big screen (which has fortunately shown no signs of giving up yet), nice fast Pentium D processor, etc.

Problem is it guzzles power like there's no tomorrow. The battery is only slightly worn out, but battery life is about an 90-100 minutes. It's portable enough, but the short battery life would make it inconvenient to haul around.

Might replacing the hard drive with an SSD improve the situation? No moving parts should mean less power consumption, right? Or is the difference negligible?

Also, what about MMC to SATA adapters like this one?

http://www.amazon.com/SDHC-SATA-Adapter-Converter-Card/dp/B0078PVL8U

Would one of those and a decent sized SD card give me a reasonable lifespan before the card wore out? And how would it be for performance, compared to a standard hard disk drive?

(FWIW I did once try a 4 GB Micro SD card as a main drive. It worked pretty well, though the write speed was a tad slow.)

 

I switched to 2 SSD's and never noticed a difference in battery life.

TH

 

Its all relative. If you have a laptop that has a slow CPU, low power small screen, no add in GFX card and limited other additional hardware then a SSD will likely help a noticeable amount.

If you have a powerful laptop with dedicated GFX and a huge screen then you wont notice anything as the HDD already is not a factor.

 

Thanks... Guess I won't be shelling out for an SSD then.

 

Not if you goal is to extend battery life. You are right they do consume less than a hard drive, but your biggest consumers are your GPU, the CPU, and the monitor.

You say you have a Pentium D but the battery is only "slightly worn out". Why or how do you know it is "slightly worn out"? My concern is that the Pentium D is around 7 years old. If your battery is from the same time period (2005 - 2006) then I suspect it is more than "slightly" worn.

One trick you can use is lower the brightness of your display.

Also, if you are worried about battery life, it is probably not a good idea to be adding cards and devices that are powered from the notebook's battery. I would look for a USB adapter or external drive that comes with its own external power source.