This article from Tom\’s Hardware on the myths of solid-state drive power consumption is pretty illuminating, and rather hilarious given how companies like Apple and ASUS have been pushing SSDs in subnotebooks the MacBook Air and Eee PC respectively.
In retrospect it makes a lot of sense – magnetic hard drives have undergone many years of evolution, and already have numerous features designed to improve their average power consumption. SSDs, however, are relatively new, and no-one seems to have figured out how to make them power-efficient yet. The main draw is their read performance (although from what I hear the write performance still stinks outside of very high end drives that cost thousands of dollars).
I guess we\’ve got quite a way to go before SSDs become ubiquitous in personal computers.