Are HDDs greener than SSDs?
Networkworld, Tuesday, September 12,2023
Operationally, solid state drives (SSD) use less power. But research finds the manufacturing process is tilted in favor of hard disk drives (HDD).
Here's a wrinkle in corporate environmental efforts. Futurum Research is backing a recently published academic paper that suggests hard disk drives (HDD) could be greener than solid state drives (SSD) when taking into consideration the manufacturing process.
The paper in question is called 'The Dirty Secret of SSDs: Embodied Carbon' and was published last year by Swamit Tannu, computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Prashant J. Nair, an assistant computer science professor at the University of British Columbia.
The paper states that the biggest carbon emissions happen at the time of manufacture, with production of SSDs generating much more carbon than disk drives of equal capacity.