7.5w? Sure.
The newer iphones (xs, xs max) (and some android phones) support 10w Qi charging per here-
iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max Supports 10W Fast Wireless Charging, Here Are The Best Qi Chargers You Can Get Today
Which the front USB ports can't supply along with 3.43w to the SSD.
Yes it can. Please don't pick and choose your arguments here ... 3.43w is
peak power rate, which is not sustained load, ever, in a Tesla context. USB media + 3 files written every minute will be idle a ton, and this isn't a binary operation where the SSD says "I don't have 3.43w? I'm turning entirely off." It doesn't work that way. It simply degrades performance.
The true power use of a Samsung T5 SSD is somewhere between the idle rate (
The 500GB variant idles at around 0.38W) and the peak power rate. It's not the "load testing, beat me up, challenge me, read/write constantly" power rate. So please stop insinuating that all SSDs everywhere are pulling their max, peak-power rate, all the time. (See below also for some issues on the power rate in my reply to n00bie)
So even assuming that I had a 10w Qi chargeable device, and even assuming that I had two of them on both USB ports, and even assuming I then had a SSD attached ... they're both going to work absolutely fine, and the slight loss to charging a phone won't even be noticeable. And that's an awful lot of assumptions and unrealistic peak power usage.
The net here is that there's plenty of power to go around for two phones and a SSD used in this context.
In exchange for basically no relevant upside unless you have to have >512GB of space in a single device...
That IS the upside. Some people have large media volumes. Some people want large(r) TeslaCam volumes. The criteria you stated as potential exception is exactly the context I'm talking about. Even with less storage, the drive you're using personally maxes out at 256gb. SSDs start looking better after that range, from a lot of angles.
WARNING BEFORE BUYING ANY FLASH DRIVE: SanDisk Tech rep said that you SHOULD NOT use any USB flash drive for Model 3 dash cam because they are not designed for continuous read/write recording. Instead, you need to use a High Endurance Micro SD card with USB reader for continuous read/write capabilities.
I'm not convinced that Tesla is continuously read/writing. One can see in the Samsung SSD the drive indicator and it's not being accessed constantly (I did just check). It's idle an awful lot. Now this goes into a lot of factors -- clearly SSD has a lot more guts to it (hence the "overkill" comments) so it might be caching data and not writing until a buffer is full. Or - we don't know for sure - Tesla might only copy out the cam files every minute.
One can say that even caching data is "using the SSD" but write operations to non-volatile memory is more expensive than RAM in any context, again going to less peak-power usage. Regardless the SSD doesn't show activity constantly, with TeslaCam running.
If it is streaming then that might be a power benefit to SSDs. If MicroSD has no hardware to cache and must constantly be in a write mode that is a higher power rate.
Either way its another factor.