It really depends on your usage patterns. Write-heavy workloads are still better cases for spinning rust due to how much harder they are on flash, especially at greater layer depths.

Plus that SSDs apparently have a very dirty manufacturing process, worse than the battery or screen in your laptop. I recently learned this because the EU is starting to require reporting CO2e for products (mentioned on a Dutch podcast: https://tweakers.net/geek/230852/tweakers-podcast-356-switch...). I don't know how a hard drive stacks up but if the SSD is the worst of all of a laptop's components, odds are that it's better and so one could make the decision to use one or the other based on whether an SSD is needed rather than just tossing it in because it's cheap

Probably it also matters if you get a bulky 3.5" HDD when all you need is a small flash chip with a few GB of persistent storage — the devil is in the details but I simply didn't realise this could be a part of the decision process

If this is really a significant concern for you, are you accounting for the CO2e of the (very significant) difference in energy consumption over the lifetime of the device?

It seems unlikely to me that in a full lifecycle accounting the spinning rust would come out ahead.

The figure already includes the lifetime energy consumption and it's comparatively insignificant. The calculation even includes expected disposal and recycling!

It sounded really comprehensive besides having to make assumptions about standard usage patterns, but then the usage is like 10% of the lifetime emissions so it makes a comparatively small difference if I'm a heavy gamer or leave it to sit and collect dust: 90% remains the same

> If this is really a significant concern for you

It literally affects everyone I'm afraid and simply not knowing about it (until now) doesn't stop warming either. Yes, this concerns everyone, although not everyone has the means to do something about it (like to buy the cleaner product)

Um, no. Not unless you're still running ancient sub-1TB enterprise drives.

It turns out that modern hard drives have a specified workload limit [1] - this is an artifact of heads being positioned at a low height (<1nm) over the platter during read and write operations, and a "safe" height (10nm? more?) when not transferring data.

For an 18TB Exos X18 drive with a specified workload of 550TB read+write per year, assuming a lifetime of 5 years[2] and that you never actually read back the data you wrote, this would be at max about 150 drive overwrites, or a total of 2.75PB transferred.

In contrast the 15TB Solidigm D5-P5316, a read-optimized enterprise QLC drive, is rated for 10PB of random 64K writes, and 51PB of sequential writes.

[1] https://products.wdc.com/library/other/2579-772003.pdf

[2] the warrantee is 5 years, so I assume "<550TB/yr" means "bad things might happen after 2.75PB". It's quite possible that "bad things" are a lot less bad than what happens after 51PB of writes to the Solidigm drive, but if you exceed the spec by 18x to give you 51PB written, I would assume it would be quite bad.

ps: the white paper is old, I think head heights were 2nm back then. I'm pretty sure <1nm requires helium-filled drives, as the diameter of a nitrogen molecule is about 0.3nm