An SSD is environmentally friendly compared to a HDD?

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Dreece

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Jan 22, 2019
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If this is the case and the future of our planet is in our hands, surely we should stop producing resource-heavy components if we have resource-light alternatives? Especially considering that we can achieve far greater capacities in SSD than HDD?

I guess these kind of initiatives will end up costing some fat-cats a great deal (ie the disposal of whole infrastructures already in place for HDD manufacture), and potentially more job losses. I can't imagine an SSD requiring anywhere near the hands required to assemble a HDD.

I'm just throwing this out there for thought provocation, not nerve provocation. ;)

Is my thinking wrong?
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Natural cost mechanics will drive this outcome soon enough and it will do it in an economically orderly fashion. Your activism would be better applied where the economic and environmental objectives are less well aligned.
 

Dawg10

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Dec 24, 2016
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It took them a while to figure out how to tax air. Now I'm hearing scuttlebutt about taxing gravity.

 
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BLinux

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Jul 7, 2016
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@Dreece When people start discussing "environmentally friendly", I always feel like the scope of the conversation is often too narrow and focused only on particular aspects; often missing other factors when you consider the "entire lifetime cost." the only sure way to be "environmentally" friendlier, is to simply consume less ; in this case, just reduce the need to store data.

So, perhaps the focus of the conversation shouldn't necessarily be about SSD vs HDDs, but the need to store information?

I have friends who are data hoarders. Over a year ago, one particular such friend suffered a massive data loss where multiple TB of data become unrecoverable and his backup plan didn't come through when needed. So, multiple TBs of what he thought as "invaluable" data went poof! However, today, he is still alive, and frankly, other than a few lost photos (and really, not all of the lost photos), he's realized he didn't "need" them. In retrospect, he stored a lot of data that really wasn't necessary; a lot of it was simply data he couldn't decide if it was important enough to him or not, and so in lieu of a decision, he just kept it "just in case". He also had a massive media collection of shows and movies that was lost. But he then realized it was just "collecting", and not really watching those movies and shows that often... he misses having the massive collection and is again, rebuilding it, but it didn't disrupt his life... it wasn't like he needed to watch those movies or shows often. If we all carefully took a hard look at the data we store, and ask why we store it, how much of the "storage need" can be reduced?

on top of that, we already know "human" data transmission is very in efficient, and so the way we store data is often inefficient. that's why a lot of data is often highly compressible. and although compression can reduce the amount of bytes we consume to store that data, it costs in compute power to compress, which consumes energy. our language is inefficient, so this entire message could probably be reduced to many fewer words.

just my thoughts...
 

cesmith9999

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Mar 26, 2013
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this can be said for a lot of companies as well as personal use cases. I cannot tell you how much data (start thinking of Multiple Petabytes) I had to hold for the "just in case we need it"

Chris
 
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Dreece

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Jan 22, 2019
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this can be said for a lot of companies as well as personal use cases. I cannot tell you how much data (start thinking of Multiple Petabytes) I had to hold for the "just in case we need it"
The following has potential in that regard I suppose...>

Published earlier this month in Science, scientists demonstrated a method that could store 215 petabytes, or 215 million gigabytes, in a single gram of DNA. At that density, all of humanity’s data could fit in a couple pickup trucks. Unlike conventional hard drives, which only store data on a two-dimensional surface, DNA is a three-dimensional molecule. That extra vertical dimension lets DNA store much more data per unit area.

Plus, it lasts a long time. "Think about your CDs from the '90s," says computer scientist Yaniv Erlich of Columbia University, who worked on the research. "They're probably a bit scratched, and you can't read the data accurately. But DNA can store information for a very long time. We can read DNA from skeletons thousands of years old to very high accuracy."
Thus data hoarders could simply purchase a DNA storage device for long-term archiving and whatnot, and lightening fast quantum-buffer fronted semiconductor storage for everything else... though this is all a long way away from production. There appears to be a great amount of research going on out there in Universities across the globe in respect to storage.
 

cesmith9999

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What you are missing here is that the cost and the equipment to read and write to a DNA strand is currently very expensive and very slow. The hoarders also want the access to be fast for them.

While DNA is a 3 dimensional helix, it has to have a mechanism to read and write to the helix and that takes time and you loose the 3D storage.

Chris
 

Dreece

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Jan 22, 2019
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Oh I absolutely understand the current known limitations, read through a fair few articles on the topic of DNA storage... was merely a pointer into the future... it would indeed be something of potential a long time from now, the theory is sound, the practicality is most definitely lacking this part of the century.

The thing that's annoying is how slow the industrial complex is at adopting new technology which would not only benefit the environment but also help leapfrog technology even further. It is as if the capitalist system is intentionally dragging its heels to bleed out every ounce from old tech before it embraces new tech fully, which simply goes against logic, but I guess profit is the driving logic of industry after all. I won't even mention the combustion engine.
 
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