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Data Storage

Hard Drives Have Less Environmental Impact Than SSDs, Seagate Says 59

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
A new Seagate report reveals that hard drives significantly outperform solid-state drives in environmental sustainability metrics, particularly when accounting for manufacturing processes. According to the storage-maker's ""Decarbonizing Data">Decarbonizing Data" [PDF] study, the embodied carbon from manufacturing a 30TB SSD reaches 4,915 kg of CO2 -- approximately 160 times higher than the 29.7 kg produced in creating a comparable hard drive.

The analysis measures the full manufacturing footprint, including "upstream extraction, production, transport, bill of material, manufacturing, packaging, and distribution stages" of each technology's lifecycle. When calculated per terabyte annually, the difference remains stark: less than 0.2 kg CO2/TB/year for hard drives versus 32 kg for SSDs. Operational efficiency follows similar patterns, with hard drives consuming 9.6 watts during use versus 20 watts for SSDs, translating to 0.32 and 0.5 watts per terabyte respectively.

Hard Drives Have Less Environmental Impact Than SSDs, Seagate Says More | Reply

Hard Drives Have Less Environmental Impact Than SSDs, Seagate Says

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  • Coz they certainly feel oh the high side for SSDs. 5 tons of carbon per SSD. Really?

    • Those are mind blowing numbers, certainly, and I will treat them with extreme skepticism until I see some corroboration.

      • Agree. SSDs do not consume 20W. First, most drives most of the time run on idle. SSDs just keep the controller running at minimum speed and HDDs just spin and have the head rarely moving. Second, at such "mostly idle" usage, consumer 2.5" SATA and M.2 SATA or NVME or PCIE drives would idle just around 2-3W - similar to 2.5" HDDs. Faster drives will have higher consumption on both ends - SSDs will power more memory and rotational drives will spin faster. But that's max 2x on idle. 20W would be a consu
      • What did you expect when a spinning-rust vendor published a study claiming spinning-rust drives were better?

    • Do you think microchips grow in the forest?

      • No, but normally as production increases a lot of the carbon offset is mostly better managed at scale.

        For example, a Diesel train may burn 4 gallons of fuel per mile. however being that it carrying so much payload that they rate it 500 miles per gallon per ton.
        While an Electric Car that says has 100 eMPG will not be as carbon low in energy expenditure if needed to pull so much weight.

        That number seems like the cost to make the material, from start, not in sets of hundreds of thousands of drives.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tragedy ( 27079 )

      Coz they certainly feel oh the high side for SSDs. 5 tons of carbon per SSD. Really?

      No kidding, and it says it's on per-terabyte basis. So 5 tons of CO2 for one TB of SSD. It's clearly impossible. If we, for example, take the fossil fuel that creates the most CO2 per unit of mass: coal; and we assume the worst case scenario of 3.37 kg of CO2 per kg of coal, that's about 1.5 tons of coal. Coal is also one of the cheaper fossil fuels. Current coal prices per ton are $103.50 USD per ton. So that would be about $155 worth of coal per TB of SSD, not to mention alll of the other costs. Now, obvi

      • ... You need a lot of rare earth minerals for solid state storage as opposed to electro magnetic storage. The CO2 numbers include the mining and refining process of said elements. The platter drive has very little in terms of chips compared to the ssd.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          I was considering that. It's not actually relevant for the calculation I was doing though. Reducing CO2 production numbers to the costs of the fossil fuel to produce that CO2 basically gives you the lowest baseline cost to produce that much CO2. Then it's just basic economics whether it makes sense to sell something for less than the cost to manufacture.

          I did realize though that I had misread the summary and their CO2 per TB was actually 160 kg. I made a follow up post to my original post about it. That put

        • If by "electro magnetic storage" you mean HDDs (hard disk drives) note they also utilize rare earth elements (REEs) like Neodymium (Nd), Praseodymium (Pr) and Dysprosium (Dy). Furthermore, note that just yesterday Western Digital touted their REE recycling program in a press release entitled At-Scale, Hard Disk Drive Rare Earth Material Capture Program Successfully Launched in the United States:

          https://www.westerndigital.com... [westerndigital.com]

          You might note that Seagate and Western Digital are competitors in the HDD

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tragedy ( 27079 )

        Arrgh. Ok. I realize I misread the summary now. The per TB basis was with a different set of numbers. Apparently the 5 tons has to be for an SSD around 30 TB in size (32 maybe?). Ok. So that throws everything off. So, that makes things a little more credible. I'll redo that. That would be 43 kg of coal per TB of SSD. So that would be more like $4.50 per TB. For retail, I can find prices as low as $45 per TB with larger than 1 TB drives with a quick search. When you consider profit margin for the manufacture

  • Hard drives operate at 9.6 watts with 0.32 watts per terabyte efficiency, while SSDs consume 20 watts with 0.5 watts per terabyte. * ** *** **** *****
    * HDD compared to the worst case scenario SSD made by the worst manufacturers worst product
    ** SSD performance rounded up to the nearest whatever we felt like
    *** Based on laboratory testing, not real real-world conditions
    **** Not reflective of overall energy consumption
    ***** We will say anything to make line go up, please buy our stock.

    seems legit.

    • Re:asterisks everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Friday April 18, 2025 @03:55PM (#65315637)

      Not so fast. If I need to install an Operating System or piece of software; the SSD completes copying of the file in about 5 minutes, whereas a spinning disk would take 30 to 60 minutes for the same operation.

      The mechanical disk has to spend an order magnitude more time to complete the same operation. 5 minutes at 20 watts (100 watt-hours) is still less than 60 minutestimes 10 watts: 600 watt-hours.

      But wait: There's more. The total amount of time I leave my whole computer including the CPU and MB powered on and running Is affected by how quickly the storage medium completes certain tasks.

      Like this install task: With the SSD my computer spends 5 minutes installing a piece of software, and the rest of the 60 minutes sleeping. With the HDD my computer has to spend 60 minutes total fully awake and performing this operation. The spinning hard disk requires my computer to be fully powered up running in the background A whole extra 55 minutes while I wait.

      This 55 minutes amounts to 55 minutes * 100 watts = 5500wH. So the Hard Drive actually requires approximately 6 Kilowatt-hours while the SSD only needs 5*100 = 0.5.

      • The mechanical disk has to spend an order magnitude more time to complete the same operation.

        It looks like they did account for this. The W / TB value is a little hard to parse, but what they really meant was: "Power efficiency, measured as the average power consumed in watts to write or read 1 TB of data." So it does account for the greater speed of SSDs... but doesn't give them much credit for it. The numbers they give are for an SSD which is only 33% faster than the HD.

        Also, this is for datacenter drives so the computational overhead is probably going to be pretty small compared to the couple

        • It looks like they did account for this. The W / TB value is a little hard to parse, but what they really meant was: "Power efficiency, measured as the average power consumed in watts to write or read 1 TB of data."

          That's only the power consumed by the drive itself, not the entire system:

          total power consumed by a drive

          • Yes, I got that. There were two separate things there: the parent was saying that the greater speed of the SSD would imply lower total power consumption by the drive, even if the drive consumed more power while in operation. And I was saying that it seemed as though they had accounted for speed.

            And then the parent was also talking about total system power consumption as a separate point.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mysidia ( 191772 )

          Also, this is for datacenter drives so the computational overhead is probably going to be pretty small

          That makes this study seem even more absurd. What used to be an entire rack full of 10kRPM SAS spindles in the datacenter has been replaced with a 6U chassis that achieves the same Terabytes with 100x the IOPS at a fraction of the power bill.

          The electricity cost is not just theoretically list it is Actually provably less based on real-world experience in this case. The number of disk units in the data

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tragedy ( 27079 )

            Oh, this is definitely marketing copy. For the carbon numbers, they give their own number for a 5 year Seagate drive, and compare it to the 5 year numbers from another study critical of SSDs carbon footprint. However, the table they pull their SSD number out of compares a 5 year HDD at 20 kg of CO2 to a 5 year SSD at 160 kg of CO2, or just 8X. The Seagate numbers for their own drive put the SSD at around 160X the CO2 of their SSD, in other words 20X less CO2 for their drive than the drive from the source, w

      • Isn't all this the kind of thing that should be priced in with a proper carbon tax?

        Just tax carbon, then let consumers decide how much money to spend on SSD vs. HDD, time spent copying, electricity consumption, etc. They are already making all those decisions now, it's just based on pollution being free.

      • 10 Watts times 60 minutes is 10 Watt hours = 10 Wh (or 600 Watt minutes).
        In the parent post all results are off by a factor of 60. The conclusions are mostly correct.

      • The total amount of time I leave my whole computer including the CPU and MB powered on and running Is affected by how quickly the storage medium completes certain tasks.

        I leave mine on 24/7; I suspect a lot of other people do too.

      • To make your scenario work your computer (and by extension power on hours of the storage device) needs to be dependent on the speed of moving data. It's not. Most of a computer's life is spent not waiting on a HDD. It's spent waiting on a user. And I just realised I have a desktop and two laptops in front of me all of them effectively have their storage devices sitting idle right now. Though presumably this one here will do something for a fraction of a second when I close this browser window.

        • Most of a computer's life is spent not waiting on a HDD. It's spent waiting on a user.

          One exception that I often run into is the case of browsing the web on a Windows 10 laptop with a 5400 RPM HDD the first time since Patch Tuesday. Because the HDD is busy all the time, with a bunch of stuff all trying to update at once, this makes web browsing becomes unusably slow. I end up having to leave it alone until updates to Windows, Defender, .NET Framework, OneDrive, various preinstalled Store apps, Chrome, Edge, and iTunes all finish thrashing the HDD.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mysidia ( 191772 )

          Most of a computer's life is spent not waiting on a HDD. It's spent waiting on a user.

          False. Waiting on the user does not matter that much. System activity does. When the computer is not waiting on the SSD that SSD uses essentially zero power. When the computer is waiting on the user and not processing the data the system's CPU and SSDs go into a low power usage state. Power consumption is much higher when the computer is under load.

          Your SSD does not consume 10 watts sitting idle - it enters low power st

  • if SSD is really worse at carbon.

    At least I'm compensating with running the latest Devuan Linux on perfectly good old hardware instead of forced upgraded overpowered hardware with Windows.

  • in fact, I don't believe it. Their competitor says "On average, SSDs consume around 2-3 watts during active use, while HDDs can consume up to 6-7 watts or more."

    • It is because it includes the "embodied carbon—or, carbon emitted during upstream extraction, production, transport, bill of material, manufacturing, packaging, and distribution stages of a product’s life cycle (Scope 3)." (TFA, page 8).

      In an SSD, each data bit is silicon area from the foundry, which is known very energy intensive. For HDD, there is only the controller. The bits are on the glass platter. Say at constant technology, when an SSD manufacturer proposes 2x the capacity, it duplicates

      • I'm not arguing your initial thesis: pre-consumer resources dominate this calculation. However, improved areal density is far more common than just throwing more chips in the case. M.2 drives in particular have a fixed numbers of chips, so increases in capacity means more efficient, and smaller transistors. It feels like this was a sponsored study, where they used the most efficient HDD they could find alongside the least efficient SSD. I certainly don't have any SSDs using 20W. My 4TB NVME gen3 drives h

        • >"I certainly don't have any SSDs using 20W. My 4TB NVME gen3 drives have a listed max of 6W, and typically are using about 3.5W during major operations."

          But they listed "for equivalently sized data center SSDs", and I doubt your drive is a "data center" drive. Even so, it still seems like their power metric is too high.

    • And how many ssdâ(TM)s are all consuming that amount of power to give you 30TB of storage? vs one hard drive.

      If your goal is data storage volume, hard drives are still the cheapest

  • In this day and age it is simply impossible to go back to traditional hard drives. Simple reason. Windows does so much under the hood, in the background, that a PC with a traditional hard drive running Windows is completely unusable.

    • >"running Windows is completely unusable"

      That part, intentionally cut out, I can certainly get behind :) It is why all my machines run Linux.

      But seriously, of course we can't go back. Spinning rust is still king when you need tons of slower storage at a low price. Plus it is arguably more reliable in cases of lots of writing. But if you need the speed and/or the massive reduction in physical size and/or shock durability, and can pay the price, SSD is just a hands-down game changer. It has done more

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ewhac ( 5844 )
      Indeed, when the first SSDs appeared, I cynically observed at the time that the only reason they existed was to make Micros~1's shitty filesystem seem faster than it was. Thus, it was no surprise when Micros~1 started heavily promoting them -- especially those weird "hybrid" drives that bolted an SSD on the side of a traditional hard drive to use as an extended cache.

  • Seagate 16TB spinning disk +5VDC 0.90A +12VDC 0.72A

    Samsung 4TB SSD +5VDC 1.2A

    Seagate 4TB spinning disk +5VDC 0.55A +12VDC 0.37A

    Kingston 480GB SSD +5VDC 1.0A

    Seagate 2TB spinning disk +5VDC 0.5A +12VDC 0.33A

    Dell 256GB SSD +5VDC 2.0A

    I'm not going to pull SSD's and drives from running systems, but there may be something to it.

    • Those are peak numbers though, unless you are in a data center (which admittedly Seagate is targeting with their own numbers), that SSD is mostly idle because it is just that much faster completing a task. That idle disk will always be spinning (yes it can sleep but modern systems simply write or read too often for that to occur) using close to that 12v number to spin spin spin.

      I don't think anyone misses the noise of a spinning disk.

      • Those are peak numbers though, unless you are in a data center (which admittedly Seagate is targeting with their own numbers), that SSD is mostly idle because it is just that much faster completing a task.

        They still refresh periodically. So even idle they use power.

        That idle disk will always be spinning (yes it can sleep but modern systems simply write or read too often for that to occur) using close to that 12v number to spin spin spin.

        Yes, it will always be spinning. But it takes considerably less energy to keep it spinning than that maximum that is used to spool it up. Newtons first law and all that. It's my understanding that it takes three times as much energy to spool up a 7200RPM drive over 5 to 10 seconds vs. the watts to keep it spinning. That 16TB Seagate in my example has a maximum wattage of 8.64, on the 12V side. So it's around 3 watts to maintain that. I would gues

  • from a real, very simple live server.

    Running Ubuntu Server 20.04.6
    Jetway fanless industrial mainboard (industrial means single 12V power)
    8GB RAM
    2TB, 3½" Toshiba HDD

    Because the mainboard is 12V only I can power this from my laboratory power supply which indicates a fairly steady 1A current draw i.e. just 12W for the entire server minus power supply losses.

    As for the HDD itself,

    === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
    SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
    Vendor Specific SMART Attributes
    • NVME has a different set of stats that show the available power states. PS3 is idle (0.05W), PS1 is the typical write state (5.8W). In practice, I typically see about 3.5W power draw when the drive is doing sustained activity.
      NVME Identify Controller:
      vid : 0x1e4b
      ssvid : 0x1e4b
      sn : XXXX
      mn : SPCC M.2 PCIe SSD
      fr : SN022788
      ps 0 : mp:6.50W operational enlat:0 exlat:0 rrt:0 rrl:0
      rwt:0 rwl:0 idle_power:- active_power:-
      active_power_workload:-
      ps

  • Even as SDDs have become more and more common in different applications, the cost per byte ratio has stayed roughly the same. The reason is that HDDs care more about cost per byte, while SSDs care more about cost per latency and bandwidth. If the denominator for comparison were performance instead of capacity, the conclusion would be different.

    • This was just what I was thinking. Spinning disk works better when you have to store a lot of data that you are unlikely to need to access any given section on a regular basis. Something like a home user's movie collection. They want LOTS of movies, but can only really watch 1 at a time.
      SSD works better when you are much more likely to need to read any given bit of data on a regular basis. The example here might be a server containing the same movies as the family example, but now it's Netflix or whoeve

  • The point they are making seems confusing at first, but then it just comes down to power consumption per terabyte. SSDs get hotter than HDDs because SSDs use more power.

  • Exponentially higher amounts of cooling are needed for spinning drives vs SSD. Major cabon/electricity use there.

    A typically narrow view of just manufacturing costs....by a manufacturer.

  • Which is certainly a metric of use.

    • How many ssds can you fit in a single server?
      How many hard drives?

      Now how many more ssds servers do you need for the same storage capacity, or how many PCIe switches do you need to connect them all to the CPU if you have a single server?

      If the server has the same IO capacity, and the hard drives can reach that, where is the advantage of faster storage?

    • It's only a metric if your device spends its life transferring. It doesn't. It'll spend most of its life idle.

  • manufacturing costs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ole_timer ( 4293573 ) on Friday April 18, 2025 @06:34PM (#65315937)
    read the story and analyze the chart - they refer to embedded carbon costs, i. e., from manufacturing not usage - we all agree the latter is much smaller but the manufacture is way higher

  • Everyone knows SSDs are more expensive than spinning disks when measured per byte stored, whether you care about dollars or CO2, but strangely they're very popular. SSDs have speed advantages that make them worth their costs but this article ignores those. If my workload demands high IOPS then I might be able to get by with ten or more times less SSD terabytes than spinning disk terabytes.

  • They are made up of paper, 100% recycling guaranteed!!!

  • I don't have time to wait for hard drives. Stop wasting people's valuable lives by making them wait for hard drives to read/write. How's that for sustainability?

  • It wouldn't be Slashdot if there weren't a whole bunch of wrenches thrown into it (and that's one thing I like about this place)...

    I wonder about the lifespans of the drives when it comes to "greenness". That is, how many drives does one have to buy in, say, 15 years, now that our powerful computers themselves don't need to be replaced as often?

    I have read that HDDs typically outlast SSDs. I don't know whether that's (still) true. I have 30-year old HDDs that work perfectly, but I've experienced
  • Every Enterprise HDD contains with a big chunk of flash and often a big chunk of RAM with a "super capacitor" to flush RAM to Flash on power loss. SSD controller chips are also much simpler than HDD.

    So since an HDD is basically an SSD plus a whole lot more. I can't see how this could be so.

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