Hard Drives Have Less Environmental Impact Than SSDs, Seagate Says

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.

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