Digital storage plays a crucial role in data centers and creating more sustainable data centers requires greater efficiency, reuse and recovery from the devices uses in digital storage systems. I recently had an interview with Brad Warbiany, Director of Hard Disk Drives at Western Digital talking about sustainability efforts in the HDD industry. Following are answers from him on various topics.
Why is scaling data storage in an environmentally friendly way paramount to the success of hyper scalers?
Today, HDDs store the majority of data in data centers and they are one of the most cost-effective solutions for storing massive amounts of data at scale. Storage devices use much less power than other components in a data center, such as CPUs or GPUs. A typical capacity enterprise HDD will consume about 10W in active use and about 6W at idle, whereas CPUs and GPUs can individually consume well over 100W. However, storage devices are typically far more numerous than either, especially as data growth continues to rise. As a result, data storage tends to be a significant contributor to power consumption, cooling needs, and floor/rack space taken up in a data center. Total demand for data center storage capacity is in secular growth, so meeting that demand at the lowest possible power / cooling / space necessary is critical to hyperscalers and where Western Digital believes HDDs play an important role in supporting this effort.
How have HDD technology innovations contributed to delivering improved sustainability at scale?
From generation-to-generation, HDD capacities within the standard 3.5” HDD form factor are growing. While there has been some growth in the power consumption due to adding additional storage platters and read/write heads inside each drive, it occurs at a much slower rate than the capacity that is added. HDD consumers not only care about capacity and power consumption individually, but they care about storage efficiency, usually measured in W/TB—the ratio of capacity available for a given power investment. The W/TB curve for capacity-enterprise HDDs has been in a consistent downward trend as HDDs grow in capacity, generation-to-generation. Western Digital innovations such as HelioSeal® and OptiNAND™ help to enable higher capacities with lower power consumption, as well as other innovations in mechanical, controller, and firmware design mitigate the power increases that occur from adding more platters and read/write heads.
How does increasing HDD capacity affect the emissions and emissions intensity of a data center?
Moving to the highest capacity HDDs is the most efficient choice for data center operators. Because HDD capacity increases faster than HDD power consumption, emissions and intensity concerns are reduced by installing a smaller quantity of higher-capacity HDDs rather than a higher quantity of smaller-capacity HDDs. Increasing HDD capacity improves the emissions and emissions intensity of a data center.
Is Western Digital promoting and implementing the IEEE P2883 standard for data sanitization on digital storage devices to make it easier to recycle HDDs – or if at the end of life, be able to recover and recycle valuable materials from the HDDs, such as the rare earth actuator motors?
Yes. IEEE P2883 is the most current standard for data sanitization, and Western Digital capacity-enterprise HDDs are designed to offer sanitization methods compliant with the “Purge” functionality in the standard. Western Digital is a founding member of the Circular Drive Initiative (CDI), a partnership of leaders in storage devoted to solving the concerns of data center operators about data security and sanitization capability within data storage devices. In addition, Western Digital offers the “Easy Recycle” program for many end users to recycle their storage devices, which has resulted in more than 26,000 devices recycled and over 11 metrics tons of waste diverted from landfills since April 2020. The gold standard isn’t component recycling; it is a circular economy where functional HDDs that have fulfilled their primary use can be repurposed for secondary or tertiary uses in the marketplace. Through our involvement in CDI, we are committed to a future where fully functional HDDs see those uses rather than being shredded and disposed of.
Making more sustainable data centers requires efforts for more efficient computing, networking, memory and storage technologies. WDC outlines its efforts to create sustainable HDD technology.
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