A new report from Seagate reveals that hard drives significantly outperform solid-state drives in environmental impact metrics, challenging common industry assumptions about storage sustainability. According to Seagate’s “Decarbonizing Data” report released this month [PDF], standard hard drives produce just 29.7 kg of embodied carbon dioxide compared to a staggering 4,915 kg for equivalently sized data center SSDs.
The article is unfortunately a stub. The original insight stems from the peer reviewed report of Tannu and Nair (2022) and is based on a meta analysis of several life cycle analyses. It’s actually cited and linked in the Seagate brochure:
https://hotcarbon.org/assets/2022/pdf/hotcarbon22-tannu.pdf
Long story short: The reason a combination of the higher production related CO2e emissions and the higher power consumption given the current power mix.
Says company that sells hard drives, but not ssds
I am all for pointing out conflicts of interest, but I bought an SSD external hard drive from Seagate, and just looking up “Seagate SSD” will take you to a bunch of Seagate SSD products. Is there something I’m missing here?
