On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 1:44 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
On Jan 5, 2018, at 3:24 PM, Warner Losh via
cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 1:13 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <
cctalk at
classiccmp.org
wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Jan 2018, Mazzini Alessandro wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure I would use SSD for long term "secure" storage,
unless
maybe
using enterprise level ones.
Consumer level SSD are, by specifics, guaranteed to retain data for 6
months
The JEDEC spec for Consumer grade SSDs is 1 year unpowered at 30C at end
of
life.
The JEDEC spec for Enterprise grade SSDs is 90 days, unpowered at 30C at
end of life.
That's curious. Then again, end of life for enterprise SSDs is many
thousands of write passes over the full disk (or the same amount of writes
to smaller address ranges thanks to remapping). Under high but not insane
loads that takes 5-7 years. So presumably the retention while fairly new
(not very worn) is much better. Still it's surprising to see a number that
small.
There's method in this madness... The enterprise drives are trading
retention for speed and endurance. When you design NAND storage devices,
you basically get to pick two of the following to optimize for: speed,
retention, endurance. Consumer drives are optimized for less endurance,
better retention and decent speed. Enterprise drives are optimized for
maximum speed, good endurance and OK retention.
As far as
I've seen, all SATA and NVME drive vendors adhere to these
specs
as a minimum, but there's also a new class of
drive for 'cold storage'
which has high retention, but low endurance and longer data read times...
I don't know if the "cold storage" SSD stuff is going anywhere. But in
any case, it seems to aim at high density at the expense of low endurance.
I don't remember hearing retention discussed at all, higher or unchanged.
I've seen briefings that suggest higher retention for that class of
product, but I've not seen the JEDEC profile for it yet.
Having drives with limited retention seems quite
problematic. And
"unpowered" suggests that leaving the power on would help -- but I don't
see why that would be so.
That's simple: powered drives have firmware running. The firmware can
manage the NAND such that it reads the data in just enough time to ensure
it can do it reliably before rewriting it to another part of the drive.
Unpowered, it can't do that.
As for writable DVDs and such, do they have any useful
retention specs?
No clue there. I worked for 3 years on a NMVE flash drive so got to learn
all about this junk there since my job focused on NAND reliability and
ensuring we met our benchmark numbers for speed, endurance and retention in
the different configuration we sold.
Warner