I am pretty sure they mean W. I find reading anything online about power and energy mentally tiring because it basically requires disregarding written units and finding out the correct ones from context.
And it's not just the energy of the SSD vs HDD to complete a task. We need to assume that once the task is complete, you will shut off your computer. The screen and the processors use much more energy than storage.
So it just comes down to… “too few nanometers”? If we manufacture the (non-memory) chips on older processes we’d cut this footprint? And was this compared to the HDD equivalent, i.e.: newer high-density Helium HDDs and such?
I thought it would be about the ecological impact of HDDs and SSDs when it comes to disposing of them, recycling cost and the amount left dumped in a landfill. On that note, SSDs are probably clear winners now that NVMe-s took over in consumer PCs compared to much bigger & heavier 3.5”/2.5” HDDs.
Each employee drives to work, lives in a house, etc. less employees means less carbon emissions overall.
HDDs fail far more often. They probably have half the lifespan of ssds or worse (depending on configuration and workload). I’ve deployed ssds to replace thousands of hdds (in a high throughput production fleet) and I can assure you I swapped (and crushed) hundreds of failed hdds but only a small handful of ssds. They need to multiply the HDD environmental impact by at least two.
