Yes, battery drain is the issue I am worrying about. I don't think it has much to do with "fast ssds are more power hungry". The stock drives are fast, and high end windows laptops have fast nvme ssds too. But they don't suffer battery drain. I think it's a matter of firmware compatibility. At this point I think we are once again screwed by the locked down apple products...and would be just stroke of luck if there will be a drive that's both fast and won't drain battery.
[doublepost=1527813995][/doublepost]Okay, it actual IS because of the drive, not the firmware.
The newer 3D nand actually went backwards in time in terms of storage cell size. Think of going from 14nm processors back to 24nm processors... Size of elements was getting too small for flash storage and the life of the cells was being dramatically reduced plus they could not get too much smaller easily.
Samsung then figured out how to go vertical with their structures to make better use of the space (think highrise instead of duplex) They were also able to improve life and make things easier by going back to larger lithography. The one problem is, the larger lithography requires more charge to set the state of the cell. Also, having SLC/MLC/TLC memory structure also comes into play. SLC is a single on/off bit per cell while MLC can store 4 bits per cell by varying the charge stored. Now, add in that these drives are up to 4 times faster than the original mac SSD's (if mac PCIe si 4 lane), you are using more power to charge the gates and at a much faster rate.
And here, you will see, the final reason why it's not your firmware or computer...(confirms the above)
Read power requirements are below 1W for both drives.
Apple PCIe-SSD needs 2W of power on everage to write. It can draw up to 3W in very very heavy loads.
960 EVO (from samsung web site) requires 5.3W/5.4W/5.7W as average power requirement for 250G/500G/1TB respectively and they max out around 9W. IT'S NOT A TOOOMAAAAH
Bummer, the 970EVO draws a couple tenths more and up to 10W worst case
The PRO version of these cards hit 8.5W max but have a similar average.
SUMMARY: While the 3D nand is FASTER and nice, it's power hungry and may not be your best choice. Look at the WD BLack NVME... it LOOKS to have fractional wattage requirements, so should be high performance but save power.
Remember, the power being drawn IDLE does not vary too much from drive to drive/size to size. Its' the WRITING process the sucks it down. and the WD Black looks pretty low. It does have a 10uSec burst draw of 2.8A which is high, but for a short time.
And another note, Intel OPTANE drive is better on power (in the m.2 form factor) So, when these are available in larger sizes with 4 lane, they will be very nice.
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