Paper Title: SSD vs HDD, a Carbon Footprint Comparison

Paper Abstract: There are many benchmarks comparing SSDs and HDDs in term of performance, power consumption and TCO. What about the carbon footprint? It is quite easy to demonstrate that Flash-based systems can be more efficient regarding the power consumption thanks to the performance density, since one all-flash array can replace 10 hdd-based systems for a given bandwidth. On the other hand, flash technology is more energy hungry in term of manufacturing. This talk presents a carbon footprint comparative analysis of a flash-based storage system and a hdd-based storage system, based on a full life cycle assessment including the scope 2 (usage) and the scope 3 (manufacturing, transportation, and recycling).

Paper Author: Jerome Gaysse, Senior Technology and Market Analyst, Silinnov Consulting

Author Bio: Jerome Gaysse is senior technology analyst at Silinnov Consulting, a consultancy based on emerging data storage technologies. He also drives the Cloud services offering at SPIE ICS, a leading IT French company. He has strong technical expertise in IP, NVM, FPGAs, and ASICs for the data center market. He successfully worked with major corporate companies, startups, and research institutes in both Europe and the USA. He is a regular presenter at international conferences such as those sponsored by IEEE and SNIA, as well as past Flash Memory Summits. Jerome earned an MSEE from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) in Lyon (France) with a semiconductor specialty.