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Am I the only one frustrated that nobody takes SSD idle power draw seriously? Most reviews don't even mention it and manufacturer-provided values are, ahem, totally bogus with little connection to anything that's been measured in the field. The 840 Pro has great specced and measured power stats (and every other metric, is made of unicorn dust, cures cancer etc.) but it's far too expensive for non-enthusiast applications relative to other choices. Other drives are largely unknown beyond the general understanding that Marvell controllers run a lot better than SandForce. How's a lad supposed to choose the right tool for the job when all anyone talks about is sequential and 4K read/write speeds?

The budget-oriented controller that PNY put in its new Optima sounds promising, though hopefully it won't be limited to use with crappy black-box flash. A lot of the problem is that low-end SSDs are made with outdated high-performance hardware.

I think SSD power draw is a little more irrelevant on desktop systems, since the range of power is nearly the same or lower compared to a standard 2.5" spindle. But in laptops, it's more complicated:

1) Idle power draw is very important, but

2) Advanced power saving techniques such as device sleep/DIPM require support from the motherboard, so it's even harder to get an accurate picture of typical idle power consumption.
2a) Even with the right equipment, Anandtech seemed to have trouble enabling these features on Crucial's M550: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6884/cruc ... gb-120gb/9

High-performance and low power can go hand in hand, it's really up to the controller to power down parts of the NAND when not in use. I understand your concerns and I agree with them, but perhaps to a lesser extent--once we get down to a <1W idle power difference between drives, it's hard for me to turn the drive away solely on power consumption.

That said, there are plenty of drives that seem to just blatantly ignore idle power consumption and I find that especially annoying.