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Comment on UK government inexplicably tells citizens to delete old emails and pictures to save water during national drought — 'data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems'

redlemace@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Data storage does not consumes energy. Read and write data does. Deleting data initate database queries and other CPU activities. This request will more likely cause a spike in energy. It won’t save any energy in any case.

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gressen@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Data centers run regular backups. The more data they store the more energy it takes to maintain it.

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- Infinite@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Data centers are almost certainly going to be using partial/diff backups. Changes are what incur most cost.
  
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IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
It sort of does. Each drive uses energy, simply by being on (spinning rust moreso than flash). As storage demands increase, data centers will just keep adding disk shelfs and more drives, which use more energy. So at home, data storage is effectively “free” since you need at least one drive running anyway. In data centers, there is a calculable energy cost per GB.

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