Opinion: How green is your storage?

Arguments about the relative costs of SSDs versus conventional spinning disks are missing an important long-term perspective – SSDs are much greener. Never mind how much un-green goes on inside the factory, just look at the difference it would make out there in all the offices and server farms. No spinning things means much less heat generated and much less power being consumed.

And much less landfill from hard disks with crashed heads or busted bearings. This is another example of the high cost argument being used to derail a move to a better way of doing things. When it comes to making life on earth sustainable for a tad longer, the cost argument needs to be pushed way back on the list of priorities, and for that to happen we need governments with guts.

For example, dropping the GST and any other taxes on products which are demonstrably greener, and hiking the taxes on things un-green. Instead our politicians are arguing about the price of petrol, which is a bit like dinosaurs arguing about whether to have children. In the end, it isn’t going to matter a whole lot.

No doubt we will look back from some point in the future on this “turn of the century” moment and mark it as the death of the hard disk drive. It might not actually happen for another ten years, but let’s hope it happens in less than three, but viewed from the year 2100 it will all look like a 21st century change.

In fact, I’m willing to bet that if this period in time doesn’t retrospectively look like a monumental change towards using resources with regard for their finite availability, then there probably won’t be all that many of us to look back nostalgically.

That’s one of the problems with nostalgia. It sure ain’t what it used to be.