New SSD is negatively impacting battery life

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Level 1

4 points

New SSD is negatively impacting battery life

I recently installed a Samsung 830 256gb ssd in my early 2011 13 inch macbook pro. i have lost about 20% of my battery's life after this "upgrade". i have done pram and smc resets with no positive effects. i have also enabled trim and repaired disk permissions. i migrated everything using carbon copy cloner. is this a normal response for this drive is a drop in battery life or am i missing something that i should have done after installing the drive? would a fresh install of everything by hand(i really really dont want to do this) help at all? i appriciate any info or insight on this matter.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Nov 1, 2012 1:44 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 1, 2012 1:52 AM in response to jessatd75

Adding an SSD should actually prolong battery life - just a small, small amount, though. I doubt that your problems are with the SSD consuming power. However, if you have a backup, it wouldn't be a bad idea to do a 'clean' installation of Mountain Lion, having erased the SSD first.

I've heard of a handful of problems here with the Samsung 830 series - nothing major usually. But I've never heard or read of any SSD (and I have a Crucial) being the cause of a power drain. Sounds as if something else is causing your power drain and it could be OS or hardware related. Try running the Apple Hardware Test to see if you come up with any errors. If you don't, it sounds as if a clean install of ML is the next step.

Clinton

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Answer 2

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

Nov 1, 2012 8:05 AM in response to jessatd75

Installing a 256 GB Samsung 830 SSD gave my battery life a bit of a boost - about 20 minutes extra - so there's something else going on. To cover all the bases though if I were you, I'd open the computer back up, take the drive out, and put it back in. I doubt it would be functioning if it weren't seated properly but I've seen weirder things go on.

Clinton's suggestion to run the hardware test isn't a bad idea. I'd also run Activity Monitor to check out the CPU usage. For a sudden loss of battery life my first suspicion tends to be a rogue process burning up cycles for no reason.

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Answer 3

jessatd75 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 1, 2012 1:31 PM in response to jessatd75

I have been looking at activity monitor and at idle my cpu is between 2-3 percent and less then 20% of my 8 gigs of ram in use. when im just web surfing i do actually get a healthy bump in battery life(about an hour) ive notice but as soon as i start accessing the drive that drops quickly, much faster then with the spinning drive. according to istat menus it will start sucking as much as 2 amps (2000ma). i do a fair amount of word processing on the go as i am a student and take notes on my comp in all my classes. this eats into the battery life aswell. im gonna do the hardware test here in a bit when im off work and then if that doesnt show anything ill spend the better part of the night doing a fresh install of the OS and all my software. at least this a solid state drive that should all happen a little faster then the last time i did trying to fix the 10.8 battery crap. lol ill let you guys know what i find out.

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Answer 4

jessatd75 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 3, 2012 5:57 PM in response to jessatd75

So after a reformate and install battery life is still worse then with the spinning drive. Its about an hour less. I used to get about 5 hours of work with the screen brightness 2 nothces from the top not i get about 4 hours and thats with almost not actual drive access just internet browsing.

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