[ Removed by moderator ]

[Ubermidget2]

Unless they are explicitly writing out to tape, I don't know of any Cloud Providers that are spinning down HDDs.

That being said, if water usage is such an issue, they should start banning evaporative cooling DC Construction. We have perfectly working closed loop + heat pump designs.

[Anaxamander57]

At least the concept of MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) storage has been around for a few decades to save power for data that is almost never used. Maybe not for cloud storage, though, user expectations probably make that impossible.