Power Draw of Optical Drive vs Laptop HDD

J

jcc39

Weaksauce
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Hi I just ordered this laptop: Sony VGN-TXN15

And will be taking it with me for a long trip to Asia. I will be using it to watch several DVD's during the long plane ride and several train rides I have planned. I have both the original movies on DVD and backed up on my harddrives.

Now my question is what will give me longer battery life, playing the movies throught the optical drive or off the hard disk drive?

According to the specs it uses a 1.8" 80gb 4200RPM drive with some kind of anti-shock protection. The optical disk is a DVD+-RW DL burner 2.4x slim burner. I can't find specific info or manufacturer of either devices on the net. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
 
sorry i can't answer your question directly, i don't know if you'd be able to find the power draw for your exact optical drive.

But I can say with some conviction that LCD brightness will play a huge factor in battery life. So you might want to figure out how to view it with the lowest brightness setting.
 
i'd figure you'd have better luck watching it off the HDD. if you watch it off the optical drive, you have both the OD and the HDD running, whereas watching it off the HDD, you'll just have the HDD spinning...
 
Good luck with watching several movies. I think just about every computer, even the ultra mobile ones can barely handle 1 and a big maybe 2 two hour films. Unless you have extra batteries, or your seated next to an outlet I wouldn't plan on watching too many of your own movies. The hard drive would give you better battery life, but the difference on an average laptop would probably be like 20 minutes, as opposed to the hours I'm guessing your looking for.

It would be an interesting article/test/research to see what level of compression offers the longest battery life. A standard DVD ripped using MPEG2 compression may cause the hard drive to seek so much that it might even be worthwhile to compress it first using MPEG4 codecs. While an H.264 codec would arguably offer the least amount of space, would the load of decoding an H.264 encoded movie offset any gains in less disk access?
 
If it wasn't too late, I'd recommend a Sony laptop that offered that "movie viewing" mode where it doesn't boot the computer, just the optical drive and the LCD and gives you 9 hours of viewing time. I owned one of those and it worked great. I can also cram about two movies out on my Macbook Pro before the battery bottoms out.
 
Edit, dude right on!

DVD/CD (Instant On) Play/Pause/Stop, Volume/Mute buttons, WLAN on/off

Your computer has "instant on" for dvd viewing, so you're set. You can easily watch a bunch of movies on DVD with that feature without killing the battery. Great choice!
 
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