Storage devices are essential to all computing systems that store user data from desktops, to notebooks and Ultrabooks ™ to data centers. Hard disk drives (HDDs) or solid state drives (SSDs) are today’s most popular storage solutions. Active power for storage devices has significant impact on the battery life of client devices. In the data center, the amount of energy required for thousands of HDDs/SSDs competes with that of small cities. In this article, we propose a range of storage power optimization techniques that apply equally well to client devices and data centers. A number of power conscious optimization techniques along with multiple case studies are discussed. On notebook/Ultrabook platforms our techniques achieve power savings of ~420 mW for HDD/SSD power during a media playback scenario. Furthermore, for an “always connected” scenario, our techniques achieve 7.5X higher retrieval rates with a 5 mW storage power budget. For data center storage, we demonstrate 61.9 percent power savings from using a swap policy optimization strategy.