2 Hard Drives - Battery Drain?

[flypenfly]

Just wondering, how much of a reduction in battery life should I expect if I install a second hard drive into the ultraslim bay?

I have a 200gb 7200rpm Hitachi drive and a 160gb 7200rpm drive.

This is on a t61P 15.4" WUXGA with 9 cell.

[awolfe63]

Depending on how the drives are set by the bios/drivers they use 1-2W idle. My experience is that a WUXA 15.4" T61P can burn anywhere from 15W (no wireless, dim screen, no 3D running, CPU on slow, no heavy application running) to about 35W (3D game).

Given that - I would expect no more than a 10% loss of battery life - probably closer to 5%.

[basketb]

No real experience with this (when I use a second HD, I'm usually not running on battery). But, I think this has recently (within the last two weeks or so) been discussed here. A search should find that thread.

[flypenfly]

Hmmm I wonder if I got another 200gb drive, I could do some RAID0 on it? I'll be doing semi-nightly backups so I'm not worried about data loss.

[awolfe63]

Not really. You would need to do it in software which is probably slower than no RAID.