News Seagate claims hard drives are more environmentally friendly than SSDs

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Don't believe it for a femtosecond, and actually really don't care.
So what exactly is the problem, first that chips use a lot of processing to be built, OK, but surely so do all the components in modern high-capacity HDDs. And I gather some of the newer SSDs run hot, even idle hot? Do they really burn more power than HDDs? I would not have thunk so.
 
I'm not entirely sure who this PR piece is aimed at.
Data storage is a necessity in this age, so while it's nice they consider the total carbon emissions, it doesn't really matter because we can't live without it.
And it's not like SSDs, optical, and Tape can replace HDDs 1:1 right now. There is a well defined cost limit, desired performance, and data retention period between the various formats.

We can talk about carbon emissions of HDDs or SSDs if they reach cost parity (which they kind of did in the 2.5" format a few years ago).

It's almost as if they tried to compare their carbon emissions against WD and that other company... Toshiba? and it turned out they had no advantage.
 
I suspect that the thing that makes this claim work is that it takes many SSDs to match the TB capacity of one (36TB) HDD.
So, whereas one SSD is more power efficient than one HDD,
it is possible that combining many SSDs (to reach 36TB) will have a larger power (and manufacturing) requirement than one (36TB) HDD.
 
The most important part I think is this (directly from the Seagate report):
These numbers reflect Seagate’s analysis based on the following products:

  • Linear tape-open (LTO) 9 tape drive + 1 media: LTO Ultrium
  • Hard drive: Seagate 30TB Mozaic 3+™
  • Generic data center SSD: 30.72TB
Click to expand...
The HDD figures are a complete estimate and the SSD figures are not only estimated, but based on a methodology which used data from system OEMs and the largest SSD in that data is a 3.84TB enterprise drive.

On a one to one comparison I could see where just from a pure storage standpoint HDDs could come out on top. That of course ignores all the nuance involved with storage strategies though.
 
You can tell how much total environmental damage something causes by the price you pay for it. It happens on one side of the transaction or the other. The more money that changes hands just means more activity, and activity that is not explicitly healing to nature is destructive to nature and even that which we do to make one part of nature better has to come at the expense of another part of nature.
 
A PR article based on third party article based on a first party report and featuring a chart that is incomplete in the one area the article is supposed to be about...There must be at least 5 good reasons TH. shouldn't have published this article
 
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I do not believe any Seagate word. Looks for me like they did not show a whole picture in these calculations.
 
CO2, the trace gas of life? Those 0.04%? It's essential for photosynthesis and shouldn't be mixed up with pollution for racketeering-purposeses.
 
The cost per TB for spinning rust has flatlined for the last four years. I bought a 10TB drive for offsite backup five years ago for $180. The cheapest 10TB drive right now is $200.
 
They are measuring the wrong thing. SSD is not about the amount of space but about how quickly things can be accessed. With the right data set the SSD can process thousands of times more data than the HDD.
 
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