Going digital with your records and documents at the office is an important step towards reducing the ecological footprint of your business. But just like there are certain paper products that are more eco-friendly than others, you can go green by buying sustainable hard drives, too. Do your part for the environment by following these steps with your hard drives and network attached storage (NAS) devices.
1. Consume Less Power
Hard drives and networking hardware specs will now include power consumption details in the tech specs. Look for the idle power consumption and read/write power consumption, and go for the lowest you can find for both of these specs. This is especially important if you have server stacks or workstations running 24/7.
Many green hard drives, such as the Western Digital Green Power series, will have lower RPMs. This won’t significantly impact your performance. In most system tests, the NAS’ RAID engines prove to be more of a bottleneck in terms of speed, meaning that the performance difference you’ll see from choosing a 5,400 RPM hard disk drive instead of a 7,200 RPM HDD will be negligible or nonexistent.
2. Produce Less Heat
Computers throw off an impressive amount of heat. If you compare how stuffy a room can get with 100 or cocktail partygoers in it, it’s way worse when you shove a hundred or more computer components into a server closet. The more heat your IT equipment puts out, the more your fans will have to run and the more power the units will consume. Furthermore, your building’s air conditioning will have to work harder, too.
When reading reviews of hard drives and other computer equipment, pay attention to how it handles heat and cooling.
Whether you are complying with document retention policies and regulations or upgrading to greener hard drives, what you do with your old hard disk drives and other physical media matters for the planet. Old hard drives qualify as e-waste, which means you have a duty to see that it ends up at an approved recycling center.
At Go Green Mobile Shredding, we can help you with this last step. We’ll come to your office and shred your hard drives on-site, so you can rest assured that any confidential data that may remain on the drive is rendered 100% irrecoverable. Then, we’ll take your shredded hard drives—and any other e-waste you may have—and bring it to a sustainable e-waste recycler.
Call us today to find out how we can help you fulfill your responsibilities by going green.
