As SSDs are becoming more and more indispensable due to their speed advantages over standard HDDs, a new study claims that these drives composed of solid-state semiconductor memories would be worse for the computer. ‘environment.
While having an SSD instead of a traditional hard drive in your computer has countless benefits, from power efficiency to faster boot times, SSDs would have a bigger impact on the environment because of their significantly higher carbon footprint than hard drives.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of British Columbia recently published a study claiming that solid-state hard drives, more commonly known as SSDs, can cause twice the carbon footprint of traditional hard drives. The study analyzes the carbon impact of different devices and components over their lifetime.
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SSDs are faster, but worse for the planet
The researchers found by analyzing the results of other studies that assessed the carbon footprint of SSDs that they have a much higher storage intrinsic factor (SEF) than an HDD, with a average of 0.16 for SSDs and only 0.02 for HDDs. SEF refers to the ratio of CO2 emissions to total storage capacity.
According to the study, SSD hard drives produce the highest emissions of all components in systems that incorporate them, or 38% of the total emissions of a PC. By comparison, a hard drive can be responsible for about 9% of a system’s emissions, a GPU 11%, a CPU 4%, a motherboard 17%, RAM 9%, a PSU 4 % and a 6% frame.
The manufacturing process of SSDs certainly plays the most important role in this regard. Manufacturing every part of an SSD, whether it’s NAND chips, DRAM, or controllers, is expensive, both in terms of electricity and materials. As a reminder, SSD production requires a lot more carbonwhich is bad news for the environment, given that SSDs dominate the current market.
They ultimately sought to compare an HDD and an SSD with a storage capacity of 1TB over a period of five and ten years. The researchers concluded that while the power consumption of SSDs was significantly lower (56.9 kWh for an SSD over five years of use versus 183.9 kWh for an HDD), the combined CO2 emissions were significantly lower. higher over the same period. In effect, an SSD would emit 184 kg of CO2 over 5 years, while a hard drive of the same capacity only emits 99.6 kg.
The study concludes that the service life of SSDs should be further improved in order to be able to compensate for the high emissions during production in the long term. Their use is not necessarily to be banned, since it already reduces the energy consumption of your computers. Our SSDs could soon become even more efficient.
Source : Swamit Tannu / Prashant J Nai
