Is Less More? Hard Drive Procurement and the Waste Hierarchy

Fighting e-waste due to discarded hard drives is a team effort. On the manufacturing end, OEMs are feeling pressure to design for longevity in order to reduce embodied carbon. But data centers have a crucial role to play as consumers of storage devices. Whether you’re a hyperscaler or a smaller enterprise, cutting down on e-waste involves having a well thought-out lifecycle strategy for your hardware.

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Recycling drives, or at least recovering valuable components, is a good thing. Reusing drives is even better. But reducing e-waste by managing consumption is an overlooked strategy. Though it tends not to take center stage, having a strategy for your hard drive procurement can make a huge impact when it comes to sustainability.

While rethinking drive procurement can’t be the whole solution to the e-waste crisis, it’s a frequently neglected part of it. Here’s a look at how to think about hard drive procurement strategically in the context of an overall data storage lifecycle strategy.

Introducing the Waste Hierarchy

When it comes to circularity, much of the focus is on recycling and reuse. However, individual components can’t be recycled, or devices reused, indefinitely. But to pick up that slack, consider a measure which too often falls by the wayside: prevention by managed consumption. Sometimes, less is more.

When thinking through data center sustainability, it’s helpful to bring in more general circularity concepts. The so-called “waste hierarchy” is a useful framework for thinking about waste reduction.

Let’s break the waste hierarchy down, using hard drives as an example.

• Prevention: When it comes to e-waste and embodied carbon, a device never made is a device never wasted. But even short of outright reduction, buying strategically helps. Drive type, source, and amount all matter.
• Preparing for Reuse: When it comes to hard drives, this involves checking drive health, and rigorous data sanitization. Of course, sanitization should be done anyway, so vulnerable data can’t be accessed on a misplaced drive.
• Recycling: Here we’re thinking about reusing specific components of a hard drive, such as the magnetic assembly.
• Recovery: This includes extracting raw materials, such as the rare earth elements found in hard drive magnets.
• Dispose: This is incinerating, shredding, disintegrating, or shredding disk media, then sending it to a landfill or similar destination. Destruction should be a last resort.

“We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move,” insisted Taoist Sage Lao Tzu. The circular economy is a different kind of wheel, but sometimes a hasty or unnecessary purchase *not* made is what’s needed to get the ball rolling. If reuse is step 1 in e-waste reduction, prevention is step 0.

Why Recycling Is Not Enough

Reducing e-waste is important for several reasons. Firstly, there’s the value-recovery angle: rare-earth materials are hard to come by, so we need to reuse it or lose it. Secondly, there’s the e-waste itself: toxic materials clogging up landfills. Finally, there’s the need to reduce CO2 emission equivalents (EQ). Manufacturing a drive takes energy, and unless the factories and mines run have some sustainable energy source, that means CO2 emissions.

When it comes to emissions and embodied carbon, reuse, recycling, and recovery just aren’t enough. The leading hyperscalers are a case in point.

Back in 2020, Microsoft set an ambitious goal to reuse 90% of cloud assets by 2025. It has established circularity centers to accomplish this, and its 2024 report claims a reuse rate 89.4%. Meanwhile, Google has resold 44 million data center hardware components since 2015. By the end of 2023, 29% of Google’s components for server deployments, maintenance, and upgrades were refurbished inventory.

However, in an era of massive expansion of data center infrastructure, such reuse isn’t making a dent in emissions. In fact, according to the IDC, Microsoft has seen its emissions grow 29% since 2020. Google’s emissions have soared to 48% above its 2019 baseline. Now, a lot of the emissions are due to energy use. But massive amounts of hardware, such as vast fleets of data center drives, mean a huge amount of embodied carbon.

Let’s return to the waste hierarchy. The further down the hierarchy you go, the less you’re reducing CO2 emissions.

But remember rank “0”: even better than reuse is e-waste prevention through strategic purchase. As William of Ockham once said, “Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. While he was discussing science, he may as well have been talking about hard drive procurement.

Why Focus on Procurement?

Tackling e-waste is made more difficult by the fact that the demand for data centers which can support AI apps is very real. This can leave hyperscalers saddled with a sense of “if we don’t meet the demand, someone else will”.

But this doesn’t mean things are hopeless. No one is recommending reducing consumption to zero. There’s a middle-ground, in which companies think carefully about precisely how many hard drives they must procure, and from where. In a nutshell, companies can buy better, buy less, or both. 

Thankfully, for an enterprise data center, this is a place where financial incentives combine. The key to preventing e-waste is strategic lifecycle management, and this also saves you money in the long-run. When you extend the lifecycle of a drive, that prevents you from buying another drive as soon. A drive never bought is a drive that can’t become e-waste, or a hit to your wallet.

Not all life-extension is equivalent. In particular, there are tradeoffs between extending first, often mission critical, use vs. repurposing a drive for a secondary use case.

Extending first use and second use both push back drive purchases: the new devices you would have otherwise bought to fill the role. And that means you delay or prevent the acquisition of embodied carbon.

The pros of extending first use is that it’s easier to do at scale, as part of a lengthening refresh cycle. It also leaves open the door for secondary use: ideally, drives can stay at job A longer, and still retire to job B. On the flip side, new storage is, all-else-being equal, denser and thus more economic in terms of units and power consumption (not to mention performance).

In the next section, we’ll look at some specific things to think about for when purchasing drives. However, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Only you can know what specific procurement and life extension strategy work best for your company.

Tips For Hard Drive Procurement and Life Extension

Here are some strategies to consider when it comes to drive procurement and life extension.

• Buy rigorously vetted drives. Buy for quality. This means ensuring that the drives you buy have passed a rigorous battery of tests. If the drives are new, see what stats you can get on longevity. Consider buying factory recertified drives, which are as good as new, and available at a discount.
• Purchase for density. All else being equal, the denser the storage, the fewer units you need, which cuts down on embodied carbon and power consumption.
• Lengthen refresh cycles. Lengthening the refresh cycle of your fleet of storage drives is a big step. However, it’s not an unprecedented one: by doing so, you’re leaning into an ongoing trend towards longer refreshes.
• Check your SMART stats. Keep tabs on drive health using SMART stats. While these may not help you predict the failure of individual drives, they can help you get a solid numerical sense for drive reliability. This helps to inform future purchases.
• Self-healing drives: If you have the capital to invest, using drives with self-healing technology can improve uptime while extending life. 
• Reduce power-on hours: There’s some evidence that switching off your NAS can extend drive life, in addition to saving power. However, this solution is only really effective, or desirable, for small operations which deploy NAS and can afford the downtime.
• Get help managing drive lifecycles: When in doubt, ask for help. A responsible ITAD service can do more than just help you dispose of old hardware. It can help you strategize for the whole lifecycle, from procurement, to reuse, through reselling, recycling, and recovery.

Taking the Fork

As baseball player Yogi Berra once said, “If you see a fork in the road, take it.” E-waste prevention is a matter of “and” instead of “either-or”. Recycle and recover? Yes. Rethink procurement? Also yes! Combatting e-waste requires a many-pronged strategy which utilizes the whole spectrum of the waste hierarchy.

By approaching all aspects of drive reuse in a more intentional way, and paying particular attention to the quality and volume of storage drives you procure in the first place, your company can play a part in the fight against e-waste — and find savings in the process.

For hands-on support procuring drives for your data center, draw on the industry expertise of Horizon Technology and engage with a partner that knows how to make a difference on your behalf.