Memory Stick Power Consumption

[JulianL]

I have a question about Memory Stick power consumption. Does the memory stick drain any power from the TH-55 battery when it is plugged in but not being accessed? I plan to leave a 256MB memory stick plugged into my TH-55 all the time as a sort of hard drive (for dictionaries, ebooks, maps, etc) so I am really hoping that this won't impact battery life (which is very important to me).

The thing that made me even think about this was that I was looking in the battery settings and I see that one of the threshold is the battery level at which the TH-55 disables the Memory Stick (10% of battery by default). I just want to make sure that this is only really an issue when the system is accessing the memory stick and not when the Memory Stick is sitting doing nothing.

If there is a drain on the battery all the time, can any of you give some idea of how much it affected your battery life?

- Julian

[KnightM]

The battery drain is negligible. It only needs to use any power just to see that it is there, and then of course uses a fraction more to access the stick itself when you want to pull data from it. When the device is powered off, the stick will use nothing.

I keep my 512 in there all the time and it gives the same battery response as if I had 544MB internal memory.

In other words - don't worry about it. You can listen to 24 hours of continuous music (MP3) from the TH-55 via a memory stick and using the hold button. Battery life on this thing is incredible anyway :)

[Sybaek]

Yeah, I'd imagine the Memory Stick wouldn't show any significant drain in power. Because the Memory Sticks are solid state electronics, as opposed to say, a little harddrive or disk spinning and having moving heads, the power usage should be negligible.