Anand's Home Theater PC - Part I: The First Builds
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 1, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
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A Solid State Boot Drive
Originally I setup the machine using one of Western Digital's 1TB green drives as the boot drive, but in the quest for lower power and a quieter PC I tried making the boot drive a SSD.
Supertalent makes a line of 3.5" SSDs for desktops, I tried the 64GB model:
Obviously it's silent and it does consume less power, but I wanted to know how much so I ran a few tests, the two systems are identical the only difference being the drive used:
| Idle Power | H.264 Decode Power | |
| Supertalent 64GB SSD | 53W | 66W |
| Western Digital 1TB Green HDD | 58W | 71W |
Compared to the WD 1TB drive, the 64GB SSD managed to shave around 5W from both idle and active power consumption.
| Supertalent 64GB SSD | Western Digital 1TB Green HDD | |
| Boot Time | 44.1 seconds | 66.8 seconds |
| PCMark Vantage Score | 3359 | 3188 |
| Windows Defender | 30.2 MB/s | 15.7 MB/s |
| Gaming | 39.0 MB/s | 11.2 MB/s |
| Windows Photo Gallery | 50.0 MB/s | 35.9 MB/s |
| Vista Startup | 16.1 MB/s | 13.7 MB/s |
| Windows Movie Maker | 8.4 MB/s | 27.4 MB/s |
| Windows Media Center | 16.4 MB/s | 43.1 MB/s |
| Windows Media Player | 4.8 MB/s | 6.7 MB/s |
| Application Loading | 5.7 MB/s | 3.5 MB/s |
Boot time was also significantly reduced, and most application-centric benchmarks improved in performance.
Pricing on SSDs is still quite high so for the most part it doesn't make economical sense, however in the quest for lower system power it can be effective.
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kc2008ls - Monday, June 27, 2011 - link
You made great choice for your <a href="http://www.totalhtpc.com" target="_blank">home theater PC</a> case!kc2008ls - Monday, June 27, 2011 - link
www.TotalHTPC.com <-- Turn your HTPC into a DCR!