Interact Publishes in European Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EJECE 2024)
Rich Kenny | July 22, 2024
Interact publishes research in European Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EJECE 2024) - Focusing on the Circularity Gap in IT hardware.
The demand for data storage is at an all time high and manufacturers can't keep up. Circular practises are vital in reducing both the missing demand and limiting the environmental cost of always using new.
The amount of storage media currently refurbished and reused sits at between 10-11% but this is only a fraction of what is available and suitable.
For the first time a large scale project was undertaken to see what the potential of the circular market could be.
Key Outcomes:
Interact, Cedar and CDI (The Circular Drive Initiative) carried out a year long erasure study of over 117,000 storage devices to find how many could be securely erased and fell within health and quality parameters that would allow second use. The results are eye opening!
87% of drives were found suitable for reuse after successful data sanitisation.
628,000,000 SSD and HDDs were produced in 2020 with many likely nearing end of 1st life in 2024.
With 62-64 million being re-used this leaves a gap of 480+ million drives that are suitable for reuse but will be destroyed or disposed of instead! This is for 2020 drives alone!
The missed opportunity both environmentally and economically is vast.
Other insights from the paper include:
1. AI and data analytics can enhance SMART data analysis for drive health.
2. We need to shift industry focus from drive lifespan to reliability metrics.
3. SSDs and HDDs fail differently; endurance and firmware are critical factors.
4. Hard drives' failure correlated with read/write activity and temperature.
5. The importance of user-friendly technical explanations in industry standards to encourage use.
6. Hyperscalers' drive decommissioning practices impact drive reuse viability
You can access the research open source here: