[sour-taste]

Storage on spinning disks does. Storage on ssds does as well but should be much less. Cold backups don't. Now, the idea that people can just delete their cat pictures to meaningful impact cooling in the dcs is just garbage, particularly now when most of the energy used in the dcs goes to gpus

[reedf1]

My understanding is that SSDs are in the sub-watt territory when idle. So ironically the act of deleting the email instead of keeping the drive in steady-state will likely use significantly more power.

[mrob]

Consumer SSDs idle at very low power, but SSDs intended for data centers generally idle at several watts.

[dylan604]

How often do you think a device is idle in a data center? My guess is not very often if ever.

[jlokier]

Often, in a system with a large number of drives where actively-used data and cold data are automatically migrated to active and mostly-idle drives respectively.

[dylan604]

If the drives are spinning, they generate heat. The drives spin regardless if they are empty or full. In an array setup in large storage pools, there's no spinning down the drives either. Sadly, there's no countering these suggestions to those making them, as they clearly have no understanding of what they are talking about. They're just trying to make their 15 minutes.

It's one thing if they want to raise awareness of how much water is being used by data centers, but it crosses into absurdity with suggestions like "delete your data from the cloud".