SSDs Are Worse for the Planet Than HDDs | Hacker News Reader

SSDs Are Worse for the Planet Than HDDs

tomshardware.com

12 pointstender_euler6 comments

Well yeah. SSDs are worse than HDDs in every way when the denominator is capacity. The headline would be the opposite if they were comparing per IOPS. The shocking conclusion: Use SSDs when you need fast random access; use rotating media for bulk storage.

> HDDs have typically bottomed-out around 3 W/h

I am pretty sure they mean W. I find reading anything online about power and energy mentally tiring because it basically requires disregarding written units and finding out the correct ones from context.

Does it factor into things like if you were to use an HDD on your computer, you'd have to wait longer to complete tasks which spends more energy and resources?

And it's not just the energy of the SSD vs HDD to complete a task. We need to assume that once the task is complete, you will shut off your computer. The screen and the processors use much more energy than storage.

> According to the study, SSD's excessive carbon footprint compared to HDDs comes from the manufacturing process itself. The latest SSDs use multiple NAND, DRAM, and controller chips, each manufactured with cutting-edge silicon manufacturing techniques and multi-layer bonding processes, requiring both expensive materials and high electricity usage.

So it just comes down to… “too few nanometers”? If we manufacture the (non-memory) chips on older processes we’d cut this footprint? And was this compared to the HDD equivalent, i.e.: newer high-density Helium HDDs and such?

I thought it would be about the ecological impact of HDDs and SSDs when it comes to disposing of them, recycling cost and the amount left dumped in a landfill. On that note, SSDs are probably clear winners now that NVMe-s took over in consumer PCs compared to much bigger & heavier 3.5”/2.5” HDDs.

I imagine the number of people who work on a chip is the biggest contributor to carbon use.

Each employee drives to work, lives in a house, etc. less employees means less carbon emissions overall.

Their math is suspect.

HDDs fail far more often. They probably have half the lifespan of ssds or worse (depending on configuration and workload). I’ve deployed ssds to replace thousands of hdds (in a high throughput production fleet) and I can assure you I swapped (and crushed) hundreds of failed hdds but only a small handful of ssds. They need to multiply the HDD environmental impact by at least two.

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