Do you have some other studies which confirm this?
For me it looks like they compare hot storage with cold/archival storage.
I don’t think any cloud storage provider would be profitable if they use 3-7kWh/GB/year.
Edit:
I found this paper https://www.cubbit.io/static/media/greenpaper.pdf .
There is stated that they are using 20W/TB (max) with HP SO 3620. Which would be ~0.175kWh/GB/year, if my calculation doesn’t suck.
Cubit states they are using 2.5W/TB (max), with there cubit cells (kinda self hosted cloud storage?), that would be ~0.02kWh/GB/year.
Please reply if you found any meta analysis about this topic (it seems pretty interesting to me).
Edit2:
I tried to find the papers of the CMU they mention in the article but I haven’t found it on google, archive, at CMU…
So I looked at another paper they mentioned in this article (https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-000409.pdf).
And they used a lot of data to calculate the power consumption and costs of transmitting data.
But it’s not realistic, lol.
I only found actual traffic estimation for vimeo for the year 2012.
Vimeo delivered 200PB of videos in the year 2012, youtube had about 100x more users in 2012 then vimeo. This would be ~2000PB of traffic in the year 2012 (not counting the uploaded videos, just the view traffic) [estimation!!!].
The study states that 1GB transfered = 5.12kWh = $0.51 ($0.10/kWh).
So Vimeo used around 1024GWh = ~$522 million in 2012.
So Youtube used around 102400GWh = ~$52.2 billion in 2012 (~12% of the global internet power consumption they state in these study).
So if I look at the data I don’t think it’s a good and actual estimation.
The Stanford Magazine used the following to calculate the carbon footprint of cloud storage and local storage:
Cloud Storage:
Traffic footprint:
The power consumption of all end user devices which use the “internet” + all the servers to run the “internet” + all of the infrastructure (copper & sea cable transmitters, cell towers, switches, routers…) which runs the “internet” + 50 million devices called “Cloud” (300w power usage each). = 5.12kWh/GB
Storage footprint:
I have not found the study but they estimate the total power footprint with about 7kWh/GB.
So the storage footprint has to be ~2kWh/GB.
Local Storage:
They used https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hard-drive-constellation,2630-9.html to estimate the power usage.
" Your hard drive requires only about 2 watts to write data. A 25 kilobyte text file takes about 0.0002 seconds to write itself to the disk."
TH states 2.8W-7.6W idle power usage & 5.4W-10.3W max. avg. power usage.
So I don’t know where they have those reading from.
Conclusion:
Using a single hard drive (without connecting a computer to it) does use less power then the whole internet + all devices which use the internet combined.
Many scientists work sloppily (there are studies about it), those release a paper and publish it on a scientific magazine (those magazines get money for publishing it). Those magazines review each and every publication, but the more they publish the more money they earn.