Power consumption and battery life
There's nothing to separate the SSD and HDD when idle, but things get interesting when you apply a little load...
Playing back a 1080p movie clip shows that the SSD is the more power efficient of the two, and that 9.4 per cent reduction in power consumption has an impact on battery life.
With screen brightness set to 50 per cent and all wireless radios disabled, our Dell Inspiron 1520 was able to loop our 1080p movie clip for 137 minutes when equipped with its original 200GB hard disk.
Upgrading to the more efficient SSD allowed the notebook to run the same task for 158 minutes - a significant 15 per cent increase.
