Power-efficient SSD drives for UnifyDrive UT2

[Berserker]

Just had a UT2 delivered and need some SSDs to go in it. Don't care about speed (its only Gen-3 capable and is mostly going to be used for backing up SD cards out of my cameras, so I/O benchmarks are all but irrelevant). However, while not the primary use case, I would like to have the option to do a backup on battery power, so I need power-efficient SSDs.

I found a few old-ish posts elsewhere suggesting the Hynix P31 Gold, but as that's a few years old and doesn't go above 2TB, I'm assuming there's probably something better by now. 2TB is probably fine, but I'd consider 4TB if it doesn't break the bank too hard.

 

[Philtor]

I think SSD’s are all fairly power efficient for the most part in comparison to HDD’s.

I wouldn’t overthink it and concentrate more on how much battery power you can obtain from any given hardware.

What about the cloud? That would be more effective surely?

Depending on the amount of storage of course! Are you thinking a UPS type setup?

 

[Minstadave]

SSD Benchmarks Hierarchy 2025: We've tested over 100 different SSDs over the past few years, and here's how they stack up.

We've grouped the SSDs by capacity and sorted them by performance.

www.tomshardware.com

This has a huge list with average power use.

 

[Semple]

Seems a bit suspect they've not mentioned the spec of the UPS battery backup.

If the battery backup is only good for a few minutes - enough time for you to cancel a running copy before dealing with potential corrupt data, then choosing between a 4 watt drive or an 8 watt drive is probably not going to make much difference.

Ideally you need to know the battery capacity and typical power consumption of the core components first.

 

[Berserker]

Battery isn't great, maybe 20 minutes under load, but I can usually dump an SD in 5-10 minutes, so enough. I do usually carry a 100W-capable PD power brick with me, so most of the time it won't be on batteries anyway. They do warn that the battery can't reliably power some 8TB SSDs, but my wallet can't afford them either, so that's fine.

Hotel I stayed at last time didn't have enough bandwidth to dump everything to cloud before I came home. I did have a Crucial X9 with me so ended up copying everything to that, which worked but requires a laptop.