SSDs Not Safe Long-Term for Archives
Monica J. White (via Mac Power Users):
SSDs rely on stored electrical charge in NAND flash cells to represent data. When an SSD is powered and in regular use, it can correct many small errors with ECC, remap weak blocks, and generally keep data reliable. Leave your SSD in a drawer, though, and it can’t do any of that.
Industry sources talk about this at length. Western Digital notes that data retention diminishes as PE cycles increase. Most SSDs run checks in the background to verify which blocks are experiencing higher bit error rates, but when the SSD is powered off, that process can’t take place.
YouTuber HTWingNut runs a (very small-scale) yearly experiment that shows what can happen to SSDs when they’re used as cold storage. The latest results after two years showed that out of four cheap TLC SSDs tested, drives that were previously heavily used (way past their recommended TBW rating) showed signs of corruption after being unpowered for two years.
[…]
If you need to park data on an SSD, check on it periodically. Power it up, run a full read/verify pass, and compare checksums for your irreplaceable files.
This is easy to do if the files are stored in EagleFiler. I periodically check all my archives, though they’re stored on spinning hard drives due to the still much higher costs and lower capacities of SSDs.
Previously:
- Self-Wiping SanDisk Extreme SSDs
- Why I’m Usually Unnerved When Modern SSDs Die on Us
- Storing SSDs Without Power
- The SSD Endurance Experiment
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SSDs would need to be stored in a "warmer" that would periodically (2-3 months) do what's needed to refresh the charge in the storage cells and do housekeeping around newly bad blocks.
