And don’t think that SSD drives would do better - spinning disk drives generally have far better idle power than SSD does, and usually much better write power consumption.

I wonder if they can be “spinned down” like hard drives. their startup time would be much faster, so it’s shutdown could even be on a tighter schedule. I mean probably they dont have an internal idle timer, but who cares if you can just have something like hd-idle that shuts it down according to a better schedule.