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I’ve changed my HDD with a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB and from day 1 I’ve experienced that the battery lasts incredibly less than it used to do. Battery duration has decreased by a good 30%. I know that for the first couple of days you might experience a sensible battery duration drop but now it has been installed for more than 2 weeks. More infos about my Mac: I’ve replaced the optical drive with the old HDD and combined it with the new SSD into a Fusion Drive. RAM: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3Battery capacity: 5849 mAh (original 6900 mAh)Battery cycles: 1251 I’ve already reset the SMC and checked (using activity monitor) that there was an application hogging the power. Any idea of what might have happened and how to turn my battery duration back to normal?
OK lets back up here a bit you didn’t swap your HD for a SSD, you added the SSD into your system. You merely moved the HD over to the optical bay and placed the new SSD into the HD bay. So… You added load to your system! The battery life will be less! But! Before we go any deeper here you should rethink things here a bit. The optical bay does not offer HD crash guard protection so if you bang your system while the drive is active you could kill it! Best to leave the original drive in the HD bay and then put the SSD in the optical bay. But wait! Won’t my system still boot up from the HD not the SSD I just put in? No, if you go into Startup Disk Prefs to set the boot up to the correct drive. But wait! You are talking about a dual drive setup not a Fusion Drive which is what I want. Well… You’ll need to think though whats important here battery life or having a fused drive set. The rub here is a Fusion Drive requires still more power! As the two drives need to keep in sync and adjust which files need to be copied to the SSD that are more needed and retire other files. While SSD’s are great they are still a tad on the expensive side when you get to the larger sizes. I still think for most a hybrid drive (SSHD) makes better sense. I like using the Seagate ST1000LX001 laptop SSHD. Otherwise go with a bigger SSD! As an example we use 1 TB Samsung EVO SSD’s in our laptops. If you do go with a dual drive config use the HD just to hold your data having your OS & Apps on the SSD.
