18 Nov
2020
18 Nov
'20
5 p.m.
On Nov 18, 2020, at 5:56 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Tangential to this, I've long wondered about some things relating to
SSDs. Are there any solid figures on their retention period after years
of being unpowered?
The reason I ask is that I've long been in the habit of simply shelving
an old hard drive when I upgrade or replace a system. I've got hard
drives that still work that hail back to the days of OS/2 1.1; some
larger ones go back to the 1970s.
You should be able to find the answer in the drive specs.
As I understand it, there are two rather different ranges of answer depending on whether
you're looking at an enterprise class drive, which is optimized for high speed and
large total amount of data written, vs. a consumer drive. The power-off retention spec is
much shorter for the enterprise drives. I forgot the numbers; I vaguely remember it being
less than a year.
If the drive has power it will do something analogous to DRAM refresh to keep the bits in
good shape. But it seems that the HDD rule that you can just set a drive on the shelf for
a decade (ditto with other magnetic media) does not necessarily carry over to SSD.
paul