Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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What is the Shelf Life of SSD’s? (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Let’s say civilization collapsed and I still want to run all of my archived games and programs that are on HDD and tapes at good speeds for the foreseeable future. If I get myself a supply of SSD’s and store them in ideal conditions with no data, no power, and stored them in a lead lined container (for pesky cosmic and terrestrial radiation) how long before the components inside the SSD’s would degrade and become unusable. If anyone has any literature that discusses in detail the mechanisms and physics of different SSD’s that would be appreciated also!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

The answer is that nobody knows because SSD's are too new to tell.

We played this game with optical media when it came out in the 80's and 90's, many claims were made about the longevity of various discs based on lab testing of accelerated aging, and now we know that simulating accelerated aging doesn't really cause the media to deteriorate in the way actual aging does.

There are all kinds of things that could go wrong with SSD's sitting there unpowered. As was mentioned, the cells lose charge over time and you get essentially bit-rot as they decay. If some part of the drive's firmware relies on a particular portion of data to exist on the flash memory and that has rotted away, well then that drive's now dead. Does this actually happen in practice? It'd be bad design, but we consumers have no way of knowing.

Likewise there are other things that can happen. Capacitors can degrade, tin whiskers can grow. All these things happen with solid-state electronics and cause them to fail over time.