WD SN550: high idle power consumption

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1

SN550 is advertised with exceptionally good power consumption both at read/write and idle. I recently purchased a 1TB version just because of that.

I put it into my laptop where the M.2 socket is only PCIe 2.0 x4. I fully understand the bus limit on max read/write throughput before my purchase.

However, to my surprise, I found the idle power consumption is far from the advertised values (.03W in PS3 state or 0.075W for average active power consumption).

With ASPM/LPM disabled, it idles at about 0.9W. With ASPM/LPM enabled, it idles at about 0.4W. One order more power hungry than as advertised!! It seems to me the firmware never allows the SSD entering lower power modes?

Tomshardware review basically corroborates my observations, in particular this slide.

So my questions to WD engineers:

  1. Could you release a firmware update to fix this issue please?
  2. Or tell me what conditions are missing in order to reach idle power as advertised?

Cheers

1 Like
2

I hope this problem will be solved.
I think it’s the biggest obstacle to buying SN550
We need to save even 0.1W on mobile devices.

1 Like
3

Hello,

any update in this issue ?

I have also to high power consumption values with such SN550 SSD.

How can we get the current status and when an firmware improvement will be done by WD ?

Waiting or changing the SSD.

Thanks.

4

Does anybody get a positive feedback or firmware update to solve the high idle power consumption issue ?

Thanks so much.

BR guiekalle

5

Hello,

any update in this issue ?

I have also to high power consumption values with such SN550 SSD.

How can we get the current status and when an firmware improvement will be done by WD ?

Additional there are new versions of SN550 available.

New products will use QLC instead of TLC cells.

Any firmware update for the old versions possible to decrease power consumption ?

BR guiekalle

6

Has the excessive power use been resolved? Now 2022 but I read that Tom’s Hardware review a few minutes ago and was shocked at how much power it used, so I went searching for verification. Now I see a comment that it might no longer be TLC. I need to check that too. I need a 2TB single-sided nvme in Indonesia where there’s few choices. Although I am planning some work where I think that speed would be an advantage, most of my “on battery” time will be doing low power things, so sucking 0.5 to 1W just for an idle SDD sounds bad.