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https://www.xda-developers.com/your-unpowered-ssd-is-slowly-losing-your-data/
SSDs have all but replaced hard drives when it comes to primary storage. They're orders of magnitude faster, more convenient, and consume less power than mechanical hard drives. That said, if you're also using SSDs for cold storage, expecting the drives lying in your drawer to work perfectly after years, you might want to rethink your strategy. Your reliable SSD could suffer from corrupted or lost data if left unpowered for extended periods. This is why many users don't consider SSDs a reliable long-term storage medium, and prefer using hard drives, magnetic tape, or M-Disc instead.
Unlike hard drives that magnetize spinning discs to store data, SSDs modify the electrical charge in NAND flash cells to represent 0 and 1. NAND flash retains data in underlying transistors even when power is removed, similar to other forms of non-volatile memory. However, the duration for which your SSD can retain data without power is the key here. Even the cheapest SSDs, say those with QLC NAND, can safely store data for about a year of being completely unpowered. More expensive TLC NAND can retain data for up to 3 years, while MLC and SLC NAND are good for 5 years and 10 years of unpowered storage, respectively.
The problem is that most consumer SSDs use only TLC or QLC NAND, so users who leave their SSDs unpowered for over a year are risking the integrity of their data. The reliability of QLC NAND has improved over the years, so you should probably consider 2–3 years of unpowered usage as the guardrails. Without power, the voltage stored in the NAND cells can be lost, either resulting in missing data or completely useless drives.
This data retention deficiency of consumer SSDs makes them an unreliable medium for long-term data storage, especially for creative professionals and researchers. HDDs can suffer from bit rot, too, due to wear and tear, but they're still more resistant to power loss. If you haven't checked your archives in a while, I'd recommend doing so at the earliest.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 30, @01:28PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday November 30, @08:37PM
They do, but you can also just punch 1s and 0s into metal and have it last rather a long time. But, I think that in most cases, it makes more sense to prioritize ease of data verification over absolute longevity as the media might last for centuries, but will there still be any hardware with which to read the media a couple decades down the line?
Regardless of medium, you are going to want to read and verify the data periodically anyways, so might as well copy it to a newer storage technology from time to time anyways.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jb on Monday December 01, @07:42AM
Not for reliability. Drop a 30 year old tape on a hard floor and it bounces. Drop a 30 year old clay tablet on the same floor and I'd be willing to bet it would shatter.
Humans make clumsy mistakes. It's nobody's fault, we just do. Any useful backup medium needs to be resilient against that sort of thing.