Jan 12, 2010
Today Google announced that instead of carrying a USB device you can now store your files in the cloud up to 1GB for free. They claim this network service is more convenient than a USB drive you carry, which may be true, but at what cost to the environment? A USB device uses absolutely no electricity when it isn’t plugged in. When not being accessed by active programs they use almost no power at all, even when plugged in. Contrast this with spinning hard disks in the cloud. Spinning those disks in a data center is expensive, and I contend that it is an incredible waste of resources to use the cloud for convenience over a USB based device. You also don’t get served ads and are at much lower risk of having your files potentially accessed by third party when using a USB device. You can reuse a USB disk over and over again, and you don’t have to pay a monthly fee based on the size of your device. Then consider the cost of bandwidth. The internet is neither cheap nor free. It actually costs billions of dollars a year to move those little bits around and moving less bits means less carbon emissions. Routers, switches, servers, disk drives and cooling consume vast amount of electricity.Even if you suppose that all the necessary power was generated by a green technology, all those extra servers and disk drives expose us all to toxic rare earth metals used by electronic devices. Pollution from discard e-waste is one of the biggest ongoing issues of the modern era. Further, imagine what wonders we could accomplish if we put all that energy to a more useful purpose than storing pictures of your cat, or another copy of your resume.Running a MySQL (or any) application in the cloud can make sense for a variety of reasons, but I don’t think that moving all your data in the cloud simply for convenience purposes is a good idea.
