Print
More power is a good thing when you’re talking desktops, but for notebooks, more power means less battery life – and in this age of Ultrabooks and ultraportables, that just isn’t acceptable to a lot of manufacturers. In yet another step towards making those Ultrabooks ultra long lasting, the SATA-IO organization announced a new feature yesterday: SATA DevSleep. Basically, DevSleep lets PHY and other circuitry drop into an almost completely powerless state – rather than a still power-consuming “Partial” or “Slumber” state – when it isn’t being used.
“With DevSleep an ultra-thin laptop that would have previously needed to be put into standby to conserve battery life can now stay on and be immediately available for use,” SATA-IO boasts in its press release.
An infographic on the SATA-IO website claims that hard drives and displays are the two most power-hungry components of any notebook, and DevSleep should help Ultrabook SSDs lower energy usage without making too noticeable of an effect on performance. The whitepaper describing the new feature lays things out in a graph (recreated above): partial and slumber modes use about 100mW of energy and “wake up” inside of 10 milliseconds, while the new DevSleep mode uses just 5mW and still wakes up in 20ms – not too shabby.
Of course, as good as it sounds, for now it’s still just paper. There’s no word yet on when we’ll actually begin to see SATA devices with DevSleep available in the wild.
Comments are closed on this article
