How Long Can SSD Store Data Unpowered? Year 2 Update

[@EugeneSan]

I, unintentionally, performed a similar test. 7+ years ago, I left 2 SATA SSDs (Intel-70GB, Samsung-64GB) un-powered. Recently, I aggregated various media sources to modern storage solution and to my surprise, there were no definite signs of data corruption on any media type. Media included: All types of HardDrives, SSDs, DVD+/-R/RW, CD-R/RW, SD Cards, Sony MS cards, Various devices with NAND/UFS storage. There were a few (~1%) of DVDs/CDs and a couple (~30%) of old embedded computers with NAND that had issues but I can't be sure it wasn't that way initially. Some of the devices left unused for 15+ years!

[@Tugela60]

They were still being powered by psionic energy though!

[@Bob-of-Zoid]

I remember the days when backing up to CD's and DVD's was a good solution, but man did you have to be on top of the details of who's media, and what kind you were using, even what software you used to write to them, because sometimes just writing to them was unreliable, and error prone, and material integrity and resistance to degradation were important. I had DVD's that after writing, and checking via comparison, were good, and a month later when trying to fetch something from them were unreadable, so I stopped using them and just saved money to get larger drives, and the fact that the price per MB went down as their size increased exponentially, I could always keep up with the growth of my data. I was already transferring my huge record collection to hard drives in 1993 on Windows 3.1! It protected the music from my cats and clumsy friends, and made my small apartment a whole lot bigger for fitting in a few cubic inches rather than a whole room!!😁

[@Tugela60]

@Bob-of-Zoid Well, CDs replaced floppy discs, which contained even less data.

[@Bob-of-Zoid]

@@Tugela60 Well yeah, but I was very familiar with those too (computing since 79), and they were not well suited for that amount of data.🤓

[@jimbotron70]

​@@Bob-of-Zoid How could you do it in 1993? Hard disk storage was prohibitevely expensive and small back then.

[@NoiseEverywhere]

I love watching these kind of informational videos about hardware. Thank you for doing this.

[@PhrontDoor]

Umm.. if you check them at 2 years, then you can't check them at 4 years 'unpowered' -- or am I missing something?

[@htwingnut]

True. But SSD's don't magically "recharge" data in NAND cells. They store a voltage representing data values. It requires a wipe and re-write of each page of data to refresh it, which takes time. Left idle long enough, the controller would certainly perform a wear leveling routine and rewrite all the data across the NAND, but there was no idle time for these SSD's to accomplish the task.

[@kuro68000]

​@@htwingnutsome of them refresh cells in the background when not actively reading or writing. Not sure if your ones do it but e.g. Samsung does that.

[@AlexKidd4Fun]

​@htwingnut Baeed on that assessment it seems the test next year will result in the other worn drive will probably have lost charge to a lot more cells so your result should the way more unrecoverable and possibly more ecc corrections. A lot longer to scan as well. They will be toast..

[@big0bad0brad]

@@htwingnut The part you're missing is that during the read, anything that needed too much error correction will have been automatically rewritten. So the worst of the situation is corrected immediately during that.

[@htwingnut]

@@big0bad0brad I thought you were referring to the one year test read after another two years. Yes you are correct, the SSD with all the errors will have the bulk re-written, but it's still a tell-tale sign of its ability to maintain integrity. In an ideal world, I would have a dozen different disks at different time frames. But limited budget and all. Was really just a curiosity experiment.

[@john_in_phoenix]

Thanks for the detailed video on ssd data retention.

[@rubyvolt]

I just fired up a machine with a 128GB install of Win 7. It was 80% full. I deleted the junk and it has just less than half but is working fine. The thing sat in a drawer for several years.

[@stevenbliss989]

Of course hardware ECC correction on multiple re-reads is what I expect is slowing it down.

[@captain150]

Actually pretty impressive for a cheap, abused drive written far over its rated amount. Only a handful of errors after 2 years of sitting, someone would be able to save the vast majority of the data if they needed to.

[@autohmae]

Thanks for doing this, for spending your own time and money on this. Long term storage is a huge issue. We could preserve so much of culture and society, but instead we'll probably have encrypted drives data stored on flash storage instead... you know why a period of the past is called 'the dark ages' ? ( we need to preserve old SG and BM videos somehow. 🙂 ) I remember a report from a decade ago, that a datacenter had turned off a bunch of machines and put them in storage for a month or so (the storage was a cold area) and all data was lost, the industry took notice and changed how SSDs work/were produced. I've searched back and found other reports about to warm being a problem as well. I've not seen such problems anymore in more recent times. It does show that flash-based storage is not like other storage.

[@alexanderwhite8320]

Greatest threat to data preservation is censorship. There was a lot of Teenfuns porn around year 2004 but now it completely disappeared from clearnet like it never existed. Because 17yo nude girl is CP. Also a lot of really important knowledge get lost permanently whe TrueCrypt forums got shut down. I even have problems downloading Skyrim torrent that is 10 years old. Preserving everything You use on local storage and then sharing it is the way to go.

[@jwdory]

Great test and video! There isn't a lot of data out there on how long SSDs can maintain data integrity. What brand were those drives? Thanks for sharing.

[@barnowl6807]

I have a collection of USB thumb drives that I use to store information and data on all my woodworking, machine tools, Welding equipment, etc. I made the mistake of storing one of these drives in a tool box that is used to store some welding rods and other supplies. This tool box is located in the corner of the work area, but well away from any thing electrical. Unfortunately, I stored thoriated tungsten rods in a drawer just under the thumb drive. The thorium is a radioactive material, mostly gamma. The thumb drive was almost unreadable because of errors. All the other drives from this batch ( Bought at the same time, just for this purpose.) had no problem. This was after about 2 months.

[@lmamakos]

High energy photons hitting those charge wells are going to leave extra electrons behind as they interact with the device. I see this all the time with a CCD imaging device doing long duration astrophotography. Thumb drives are built to a price point and likely have less margin in them; TLC flash the same way - how many different levels of charge can be distinguished per flash cell? Dumping extra electrons in there is also going to eat into the margin. Heat is also a concern if you're worried about long term storage and maintaining the charge over long periods of time.

[@mikehigham23]

Simples: LOST DATA is NOT a PERFORMANCE issue. It's just worthless unless 100% of the SSD is recoverable 100% of the time! No excuses about how it got on performance-wise. No excuses about how it recovered some border-line sectors. All that's been proved here is the ABSOLUTE NECESSITY for full and regular backups of everything to more long term reliable media.

[@igelbofh]

The standard consumers SSD are tested against though only requires one year of unpowered data retention.

[@HangoverTelevision]

Thanks, this is an important video for all those SSD-Nerds who still believe SSD is the best thing in the world for long-term storage.

[@DariaTimurovich]

The video proofs that the only case to use HDD is a long-term UNPOWERED storage. All other cases are for SSDs.

[@stevenbliss989]

This is why you should ALWAYS use spinning disc HDDs for any long term retention, GO NAS!

[@fontenbleau]

Nas is network access storage i presume? But what file format? NTFS do not have self healing like ZFS corporate system from Sun-Oracle or indestructible journal like NILFS2.

[@randysalsman6992]

@@fontenbleau Nas stands for Network Attached Storage.

[@esecallum]

Who Is Nas

[@stevenbliss989]

@@esecallum NAS is Network Access Storage. A box with a bunch of drives (2-12, 4-8 most common), setup into a redundant drive array (usually RAID-5) and accessed via a LAN.

[@stevenbliss989]

@@fontenbleau yes NAS, the system/file format is not the point here, it is simply separate HARD drives for archive storage. Way safer that internal drive, or SSD off course. The long term safety of these and backups are a complex matter. Just saying, have something outside you PC that uses HARD DRIVES.

[@j.d.3269]

I'm more interested in data retention within specified TBW, like 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%, because I don't use any SSD beyond its TBW limit.

[@christodd3361]

"Smart guys" online like to make jokes about folks who still use HDDs, never mind optical media and tape.. It's your funeral. Flash is NOT SUITABLE for long-term storage.. And this is with higher grade stuff you see in SSDs, never mind the basic cheap media used in USB sticks and SD cards. Newer isn't always better for every purpose, children. Spinning rust may be old and slow, but I have a HDD from 1987 that still reads - and the Cloud isn't your computer. If you want to keep data, you need different media and multiple backups. It'll be a sad day once everything goes to 100% flash.

[@KryptLynx]

I pretty sure it is not about time, but about worn out of ssd (which is even worse) Not sure about current state of things, but early.SSDs did literally melt memory cells during write. But but between writes it stays in solid state represanting value of the cell (it literally in the name: Solid State Drive)

[@Dragunov-1svd]

I just found a 2 Gb SD card that I have had since 2007. It still has photos and it hasn’t been touched since 2010.

[@prahalb]

​@@Dragunov-1svd back then qlc did not exist

[@prte101]

For working I use SSD 2,5", in few months I guess with a new laptop I will get m2 NVME SSD, but for storage, I use always HDDs, whats stored there, will hold long.

[@xephael3485]

Tape has a horrible successful data restoration track record from multiple studies; that we're not done by tape manufacturers.

[@HelloHelloXD]

Great video, thanks

[@IEnjoyCreatingVideos]

Good video Thank you for sharing :)

[@ovalwingnut]

Very InTeReStiNg (and revealing!)... Well done. Thank you for "taking one for the team". I can cross that off my bucket list. Definitely a sub-worthy video. I should have realized that anyone with "WingNut" in their name would have their act together. Cheers from So.Ca.USA 3rd house on the left (please call before stopping by)

[@njpme]

Get help

[@ovalwingnut]

@@njpme Hey! I resemble that statement. Just saying...

[@jamescrook99]

Clear and simple, thanks

[@SimpMcSimpy]

My Samsung 2TB EVO drive started massively degrading after 6 months of use, I even lost some of my data. In total I wrote 50 GB in total during those 6 months. At the same time I have 10 years old Kingston SSD in my PC, which is online at least 8h each day. Worn is 5%. It's a lottery with these SSDs. In my home lab PC I use mostly HDDs and one SSD that is more like a cache. I load the most critical stuff (with lot of writing) to a memory drive in order to avoid disk drives wear.

[@dedpoolnotmarvel]

Did you use a samsung 990 EVO? and more importantly did you do a firmware update?

[@SuperConker]

@@dedpoolnotmarvel It was most likely the 870 EVO (sata) which is Samsung's most unreliable SSD to date.

[@dedpoolnotmarvel]

@@SuperConker you must have gotten one of the early 870s since later produced drives fixed the NAND failure. samsung has a history of selling SSDs that have problems on release. hope you didn't lose important Data

[@chengong388]

I had a really old 512gb 860evo I used to run torrents, it had 0% drive health left but still ran for over a year with no issues.

[@JamesSmith-ix5jd]

I plan to do a similar but more extensive test with flash drives instead. Flash memory is flash memory, the firmware and the controller doesn't matter in this case because it isn't being used when the disk is powered off. The only thing which will matter is if it's MLC, TLC, or QLC (I'm not sure if this type is used in flash drives or not). I plan to test certain things. First of all - record at +65C but store at -15 (people are saying that big temperature allows electrons to enter the gates easier, while lower temps slowing their escape). Then a few would be periodically connected but without rewriting the data, a few connected and data rewritten. I also want to test btrfs or zfs with scrubbing. And some other things, maybe sending +5v permanently?

[@lmamakos]

I do imaging with a CCD detector which accumulates charge in wells as photons interact with the device. High-energy particles deposit extra charge in the wells as they interact with the CCD. I also get "thermal electrons" that accumulate in the well over time - it's very obvious and happens at a pretty well understood rate. The rate at which those electrons accumulate in the charge wells ("pixels") doubles for every 10 degrees C of temperature increase, which is why these scientific imaging cameras are cooled with peltier devices. I image at -20C to both minimize this effect as well as to have predictable calibration frames to remove these in the image processing pipeline. Now, I'm not saying that the charges are affected exactly the same in flash memory cells as in a CCD image sensor.. But both classes of devices are still using a silicon-based substrate and it's likely that some of the basic physics still is at play in both devices. So I'd say that from my directly observed experiences with imaging devices that lower temperatures are going to be your friend to avoid either or both of unwanted signal (extra electrons), or the charge leaking off at an accelerated rate.

[@igelbofh]

I've had a QLC ssd crap itself after only 1DW. The read speeds dropped to 2kb/s. Data was still coming out but it wasn't worthy. I still try to buy MLC when possible. TLC only if there is dram. QLC is a total no-no

[@jboomhauer]

Interesting test!

[@Kyanzes]

Good technology video, thank you!

[@Madcypher]

Given these are cheap, generic drives, do you think better, higher quality, branded drives would fare better? This is good for what it is though...

[@htwingnut]

I figured using cheap SSD's would be a good baseline for expectation. However, NAND is NAND for the most part. There's just different degrees of performance and endurance.

[@bakakafka4428]

@@htwingnut Great video! Yes, the NAND chips and how worn they are seems to be the key. Can you tell what NAND chips are in your SSDs? Brand would be interesting to know

[@churblefurbles]

x25-e were SLC and 50nm massive cells, should be most robust, but capacity is only 64GB.

[@kuro68000]

I think the take away here is too keep SDDs powered, or at least do s full scan every 6 months or something.

[@AlexKidd4Fun]

Actually it seems to me the failure factor really is the wear factor. If you rewrite the cells a lot of times then you will need to replace it sooner. If it doesn't get written much they seem to still retain solid charge and so unpoweeed doesn't hurt much.

[@farhanrejwan]

it's now much more than 6 months, with the limit now pushing day by day as the technology keeps maturing. new brands are coming with their SSD products and giving 5 years of warranty, where HDDs had 1 or 2 years of warranty at most. this means they're confident enough that their SSDs won't loose any data even if they sit unpowered for 2 years. but yes, powering up your SSDs about once a year or two absolutely makes sure to refresh the degraded charges and keep the data not being lost. it also makes sure to perform wear leveling on your SSDs. a 5 year warranty doesn't mean you should keep it unpowered with data stored for like 4-5 years. these devices are meant to be used for once in a while at least.

[@dmitripogosian5084]

@@AlexKidd4Fun Wear and data retention while unpowered are two separate issues

[@yoppindia]

are there any critical sectors like hdd, if it fails the drive is unrecoverable in ssd?

[@igelbofh]

Actually the standard for SSDs is 1 year unpowered retention. Storing it for 2 years with only 4 errors does not mean the SSD is on its way out

[@htwingnut]

It's not only 4 errors, it's over 200 thousand errors, although corrected by ECC. 4 files were corrupted because of this, and also resulted in a significant speed reduction.

[@igelbofh]

@ thank you for the correction. This is still much better than what is expected though. Consumer SSDs are just not great, and SSDs are not long term data storage.

[@cpuuk]

Interesting. Thank you.

[@prahalb]

I can't find if these jajs600m238c are SLC, TLC or QLC. I wonder if a QLC would last a year unpowered. I woud not be surprised by an SLC cooing with 7 yermars unpowered. Mind HDD also lose storage with time unpowered due to magnetism...though very slowly (seems my 20 years old HDD is still fine

[@jackipiegg]

I see what you did there. Using cheapo no brand name SSDs to get results faster, name brands like samsung would take a lot longer to get results. Btw, you should blow hot air on that worn ssd and re-test. I did it for mine and it magically worked, but of course, enough time to get the data out.

[@farhanrejwan]

speaking about samsung specifically, it's a lot harder now-a-days to get an original samsung SSD, and many fake samsung SSDs are now in market with very similar looks with the original ones and much improved initial performance, so much so that a mere speed test or capacity test is no longer enough to differentiate between them, even for experts. sellers in many countries have now bought sold fake samsung SSDs thinking they're the real ones, because the initial tests looked very promising. now obviously, they wear out much faster than the original SSDs, but even that takes like a year or two before you can know it.

[@farhanrejwan]

also, that's exactly what we needed, about how the cheap ones perform in the long run under various certain conditions. this will assure many that the good reputed brand SSDs they've bought are actually going to perform much better than the ones shown here.

[@RT-qd8yl]

@farhanrejwan Why wouldn't you be able to just look up the serial number like everything else and check Samsungs db?

[@russellstyles5381]

They can fail. I had an SSD sit for 2 or 3 years, when I tried to put it back in a pc, windows didn't even see it. Worked just fine when removed.

[@esecallum]

Why not freeze it and try it?

[@russellstyles5381]

@@esecallum Did not think of it.

[@ralfbaechle]

I wonder how the drives were stored? Rule of thumb is higher temperatures should negatively corr3with data time retension. SLC vs MLS, TLC AND QLC would also be interesting. I have an 80GB intel SATA SSD which I didn't use much due to its limited capacity. It spent most of it's life since ca. 2010 on the shelf. It's holding up well just like my second oldest SSD, a Samsung 860 Pro SATA drive which hs been used in my daily driver laptop for like 8 years. To a degree the question of data retension is moot as SSDs are still way too expensive and small in capacity compared to the eust tumbling cousins.

[@ClassicTrialsChannel]

Ive been lucky with all my SSDs . i have never lost one. I've lost a few HDDs . my oldest SSD is over 14 years old. the drive I have are micron or Kingston drives. 128gb was my first up to 1tb. when I update the main drive, if I need more space. i buy a caddy and use the older drive as an external drive.

[@chengong388]

We’ve had thumb drives for many many more years At least my 5+ year old thumb drives all seem to have their data, not hash verified obviously.

[@truespirit]

Disks? They look more like silicon wafers to me. That's like saying someone is filming you when they are recording you on camera. Film? what film? lol

[@laurentitolledo1838]

digitizing you with their camera?

[@movax20h]

I had two unpowered for 5 years. Zero errors. (Had checksums, zfs checksum s, zfs mirror, smart scans, etc). But I wouldn't recommend this. Crucial drives, don't remember model atm.

[@dmitripogosian5084]

Had checksums, zfs checksums, zfs mirror, smart scans, etc. When did you have them, since you are talking in plurals ?

[@Mrpurple75]

Too bad you can't make them out of what flash drives are made out of. Mine has been washed and dried and has sat for a decade and no noticeable loss that I can detect

[@ALG-IT-NY]

I would love to see a SpinRite v6.1 Level 3 recovery/refresh done on the drives after the year 4 tests are complete. Hopefully SpinRite v7 will be out by then.

[@streamdx]

Level 3 is NOT RECOMMENDED for SSD and SMR spinning drives You can read this info in menu where you select SpinRite Level

[@vonzellable]

Now you just need a time machine so you can do these videos faster. :)

[@crazysquirrel9425]

I had some SSD's unpowered for about 2 years. Everything n them was GONE.

[@akierum]

Now check it with spinrite 6.1 that can fix slow ssd's

[@esecallum]

Why not put them in a freezer in a ziplock bag? Or put them in a ziplock bag and freeze in ice in a freezer?

[@Mr.SharkTooth-zc8rm]

😎👍

[@habana7638]

I'm curious how that bad SSD look like after a secure erase?

[@DariaTimurovich]

In theory, repeated erasing cells without data writes between them (the erasing voltage removes charge trapped by damaged isolator layer), alternating with heating the NAND-chips (fixes defects in isolator's crystal structure), could somewhat heal worn-out NAND-memory.

[@00Resev]

Incredibly useful information. Thank you!

[@JasonThomas-y7l]

I really appreciate your efforts! A bit off-topic, but I wanted to ask: I have a SafePal wallet with USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?

[@rudypieplenbosch6752]

Interesting thanks for the info 👍

[@greekgod41]

280 Terabyte drives?? Lol, sorry mate no such thing

[@DariaTimurovich]

280 TB were written to the 128 GB disks before testing. Writes are slowly wear out memory cells and they can store data for shorter period of time, and 280 TB written is way more than the warranty covers. In other words, the video shows the worst use case of SSDs, and some files are really lost.

[@esecallum]

Maybe use HDD Re generator to fix them...works very well on hdd

[@randysalsman6992]

2 totally different technologies. That be like trying to freeze your food in a stove, or cook your food in the fridge/freezer. Yeah they both deal with food but they're 2 totally different technologies, just like both the HDD and SSD deal with data.

[@esecallum]

@@randysalsman6992 steve Gibson's spin write can by used for sdd too he says!!!!

[@Xcelsior86]

PLEASE DON'T!!! For the same reason as why you should disable defragmentation with old(er) Windows version for SSDs. I love HDD Regenerator and it has helped me before with HDDs but it is deadly for SSDs due to excessive write access to the medium. If your flash was not worn out before, now it will be. Also when you defrag your SSD it is not the same that happens as with a HDD. This is the reason why on more recent Windows versions the block display of the progress is now gone because this does not apply to what is done with SSDs. Unlike with a HDD where restructuring your data for better access time, this is not true for SSDs. All data basically has the same access time regardless of where it sits on the storage as no movable part (platter header) is involved anymore. Instead SSDs are handled by assigning a TRIM command when you do a "defrag". This tells the controller on the SSD to do housekeeping as it see fit, like finally erasing stuff instead of simply having it marked as "deleted" and therefore preparing it for a faster write the next time storage is needed (instead of having to delete it then before writing to it).

[@esecallum]

@@Xcelsior86 steve gibson of spin rite says you should use spin rite to refrsh the sdd. it is similar to HDR

[@Xcelsior86]

@@esecallum Thanks for this alternative but I do not know how to feel about some of the "magic" they advertise, at least in the way it is presented on the front page. If you look closer into the FAQ they also back off quite a bit and let you know that especially with SSDs it is a hit or miss when it comes to data recovery and more. In my opinion Spnrite sounds as good as HDD Re-generator. Maybe it is even more advanced as it "supports" or should I say, is aware of SSDs and what to do with them. Their example on the website with an SSD becoming really slow and then magically recovering after running Spinrite over it...yeah, that's what a TRIM command does. Also there is a reason why many SSDs vendors have their very own SSD tool. They just know best what to do with their devices, maybe even by using some hidden commands. Spinrite also says they can improve the data lifespan/stability by rewriting data to keep it fresh (FAQ also states that you should do this maybe once a year). I see this as a useful feature, although I would like/hope that the vendor specific tools also do something like this or the TRIM internally does something like it. In the end a program, regardless of written in high level language or down to assembly, will always only be able to send a command to the SSD controller. I doubt that it is possible to get much actual data about the integrity of the flash memory. For the SSD controller itself however this should easily be possible. It can interact with the NAND checksums which I think should also allow for error correction. Therefore I would always give the vendor tool a go before trying to run any universal third party tool.

[@esecallum]

Why not store the sdd in a powered docking station which is always on and hence sad could last forever... Try it Now.

[@tracesmith3572]

Because in order to keep fresh it has to do writes.

[@moefuzz5909]

your audio sounds like you are speaking thru a pillow. unlistenable

[@htwingnut]

You are correct. Sorry about that I keep trying to improve, but I have limited resources to do so, and need something wireless to freely move.

[@fontenbleau]

We really need completely new tech for this, NvME is already too slow to load big neural networks. As with all tech we are in final stage of SSD - the cheapest worst copy of an original which can't improve. Thanks god neural nets working from RAM, their read/writes from SSDs only would destroy disks in few days. The deficit of VRAM in consumer GPUs is the main obstacle of all industry, to even run big LLMs offline you need a 128Gb RAM today minimum (for future years a terabyte RAM better).

[@randysalsman6992]

NVMe

[@fontenbleau]

@randysalsman6992 Are you my free secretary? Who cares, it's yesterday tech already.