I thought I lost my usb drive. 7 years later I found it under my car seat. Might have slip out of pocket while driving. Data still intact after 7 years of brutal environment inside car, hot, cold.
I have had a USB flash drive in my car for years and it is about 15 years old (4GB) but its for mp3´s for the car stereo and since i drive very little its seldom even powered up and i have had no problems and here in Stockholm Sweden the outside temperature can be over 30 degres C in the summer (much more in the car) and -20-25 in the winter in the worst cases and also quite humid.
The oldest SSD I have checked was a 128MB thumb from 2005, lost since then in my junk drawer, until I FINALLY cleaned it out (almost 100% useless stuff). It was filled with pictures, videos, and documents I thought I had lost forever. It was fine. BTW, back then, that 128MB thumb drive sold for $18 at Target, which was a real bargain at the time.
Thats a flash drive not an SSD lol. Very similar, SSDs use flash memory, but theyre a bit more complex on the inside than a thumb drive. People are always super doom and gloom abkut flash media, SD cards etc over time. Its way overblown. If you dont abuse them and write read too often, theyll likely last a long time. Ive got SD cards that have been in devices with ocassional uae for like 15y and it still works fine.
I read somewhere that modern NAND flash is almost immortal when run in SLC mode, since the charge level in the floating gate always remains far below spec, leakage at those levels is miniscule, and signal processing is way easier when the controller only has to check for the presence or absence of a charge. Though using SLC flash for bulk long term storage would be pretty silly for most applications due to the price. By the way, this video was a pretty good reminder to power up some of my old forgotten devices to keep their little machine spirits from starving to death.
@@JessicaFEREM Thats for sure not SLC, you are probably reading some advertisement bs like "SLC Cache" and other stuff they shove into names to make you think its something better. All it means is that your TLC cells are used as a cache in SLC mode meaning that your drive is only fast when empty because they didn't want to include actual cache on the drive.
The fact is that although real SLC is rare and expensive it is worth it to those who need speed and longevity. I would still very strongly advise against storing any important data on just one storage medium type. Ideally the more important it is the more copies there should be as well as a diversity in the type of media. This way if one copy is bad you hopefully still have good ones left. This can be for personal documents that don't get shared with ANYONE or with ones that you do share for various reasons. Also if the documents backed up were scans of any paper copies keep them too. That just gives you one more backup even though there may be more labor in scanning them again. Then if all else fails hopefully you still have the paper copies. Just remember to store them in a cool dry place where insects will not get in and destroy them. Some people may think that multiple backups is overkill but they don't realize that keeping those is a good idea. They are just cynical and think it is more money and while drives are not free they are surprisingly cheap these days. A 1 TB 2.5 inch hard drive was just a bit over $50 for me after taxes.
Add to the statistics pile... I have an SSD as a boot drive in a rack server. I powered the machine down in the summer of 2016. Not expecting anything, I booted it back up about a month ago (2023) - so it had just sat for 7 years - and it was perfect! Everything fired up like nothing had happened.
I was going to comment on how useless a one year video would be (anyone who has known what an SSD is for more than a decade knows that they can safely expect one to last way way longer) but then it occurred to me: what if all the SSDs and flash drives that we have that have retained data for a decade or more have done so because they are a decade or more in age? What if modern SSDs are much worse? Thank you for this series.
I agree. You would need to have decades of drives to do this test and by then the units would be obsolete. Its a nice thought. I have a box full of old thumbdrives that i will probably never use, but when i go to look at one for making a giveaway content, i have to move data that has been sitting there for years and years (sometimes over 10yrs). I don't see data loss. Furthermore this test would be rendered useless unless people bought the same drives as you. I would for maintenance if just pluging in the drive is good enough, or you should move it to refresh it (ie does plugging it in refresh the state of all bytes to max) this test should be doable in some way.
I did buy SSD in the year 2011, but it didn't survive power surge. It took me a decade to buy another SSD, because data reliability is much more important than speed. However I also have an USB stick, which I bought in the same time and there are some MP3s in it. I tried to listen them this year and while you can still access them, some of them are corrupted. The corrupted data isn't constant. Part of the songs are all right and part of the songs have cracking sounds in it.
I've got an old Kingston HyperX 2.5 that I still use to this day on random machines for a donor boot drive, etc. It's wearing down according to the S.M.A.R.T report, but still well within usable range even after ... 11 years. But it does have some issues it appears in some part of it from time to time, and having (I think) identified the problem area of the memory in software side of things; I tend to just format around the sectors via byte based formatting. Works like a charm after that, for the most part. Meanwhile, some western digital m.2's I bought not even a couple years ago in total between them all have failing life spans despite being generally well taken care of. One of them outright failed I think in a bad enough way that it corrupted all sorts of boot files that to the best of my ability at least cannot be fixed without serious risk to the rest of the data on the device. Sure, failures happen. But the other 2 similar m.2 drives I have aside from that one that failed; also have failing life spans already too. Not a good look for WD from my angle. Current machine being used has 2 P1600X optane m.2 drives. Low storage capacity, but so far absolutely zero issues. A little slower than the absolute fastest stuff out there now I admit; but stable as stable by definition gets as far as I am seeing so far. I've had these for about half a year so far. The WD's already started showing degradation by this point. I love it. I might spring for the 500$ 960 GB U.2 version instead. (on sale right now.) If it's just as reliable as its m.2 smaller version, then I am quite happy to pay that much, and more; to go with a Raid 60? setup perhaps?. Anyways. Aside from all of that; Samsung evo 2.5 drives seem to do well as far as I care so far as well. I've had a few in the past, but they got sold with other machines I built for people who didn't want to spend a lot on a new drive. Zero'd the data on those drives for them, did a test or two for reliability insurances, and didn't see any reason to not pass them on for a lower cost. Can't say for certain how long those are lasting those customers in the past, but based on how well my kingston one is doing and how well my other samsung 2.5's have done over the past decade prior to each's own sale as second hand; I suspect they are probably still working to this day. Aside from catastrophe somehow. I suspect my new 2TB one will probably last a decade before replacing it becomes a concern at all. Smart data on all my 2.5's of samsung brand in the past basically still had 97+% life span left prior to selling as used. What else... oh; haven't booted up my other newest m.2 from samsung yet; cause the pro drives apparently need a firmware update right away prior to real use or you suffer a ridiculous drop in lifespan for the drive. no thanks. So, I'm considering getting another optane drive for booting for that machine, and fix the samsung drive that way first before letting it get real use. Slight cost to the wallet, that mostly can be justified by just how stable those optane drives seem to be as boot drives. Seriously. I can't begin to explain just how nice and stable this setup has been with them.
I have a couple of 60GB slc ssd drives of 13 years old, not powered on for at least 10 years. Data was still fine and one drive still worked perfectly. One has become really slow, like 100KB/s write speed. These were used in a server and cost 750 euros a piece. It ran an intensive database application. I use 2x 8TB qlc ssd drives for storage and backup every 1-3 months for 9 months now, so far no issues. The backup is powered off and stored at a differend location.
Check the SMART info on that slow one. When SSDs have used up all their hot swap cells they tend to drop the write speed way down to prompt people to back it up before it dies. Some SSDs when they fail will block writing completely. Some SSDs will self brick and make themselves unreadable so you data is inaccessible.
@@imqqmi From my experience the data in those flash drives outlasts the functionality of the controllers. All the broken SSD's I encountered had a dead flash controller.
For craps and giggles you could just wipe the slow drive and try to write then see if the performance returns to normal as some have experienced with some models of Samsung drives.
I just found a 12-year old USB drive recently.. a rabbit-themed Chinese New Year exclusive Kingston USB drive with a whopping 8GB storage, which was top of the line back in the day. Coincidentally this year it's the Year of the Rabbit as well, so it has come full circle. Worked fine. My files and backups from 12 years ago are still in there, and when viewed based on detailed properties they're all still showing that they're created or last modified 12 years ago!
Crazy how humans managed to create such micro architecture and it still managed to surpass over 4 times it's manufactured limit. Kinda mind boggling. Also great experiment, and an informative video about digital data storage to boot. Love to see more!
Think that's crazy back in 2015 TechReport had a Samsun 840 PRO reaching over 2.4 PB written without error which is 33 times its rated limit of 73 TBW, and in 2017 a German outlet had a 850 Pro 250 GB last a whopping 9.1 PB before dying which is 60 times its rated limit of 150 TBW.
Since SSD's, they are dancing to prevent parallel architecture. Every storage chip should be part of a "striping RAID" by default, pulling 100% of the available bus bandwidth for data transfer. The whole storage market became a collective scam.
Very cool. Just one thing I'd recommend: Write the data in a raw format to the SSD. I don't know how to do this in Windows but on Unix systems, for example on Linux, you can copy the bytes coming from /dev/urandom onto the SSD directly (without filesystem or partition table) and just calculate the hash of that. For example: sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdc bs=2M oflag=sync status=progress sudo sha256sum /dev/sdc # this will print the SHA256 hash Then later you can just calculate that one hash again and determine if anything changed much more easily, without a filesystem. And it would also be more accurate since you're checking every single byte.
@@HappyGick most filesystems don't have data checksums (ZFS does, but FAT certainly doesn't). the real issue is that all SSD firmware actually uses a redundant encoding for blocks, and you can't count on being able to read data before it's been corrected. so the hashing is probably pointless: the firmware is already detecting and correcting corruption, and won't return incorrect blocks (will return an error instead).
It's really weird how the UA-cam algorithm works. I normally don't watch videos with only 40 views, but this one piqued my interest. Great video! I'm looking forward to future updates. See you again in the coming years. :D
I lost a Sandisk USB pendrive, 16gb, somewhere around the house, i moved 3 times during that time, i find it with the last move i made, it was stuck under a flap of a box of random stuff! Ow, how long was this pendrive lost? About 10 years, yeah, crazy, i know! And did it still had anything on it? Yes, yes it conserved all the data wonderfully, it had some pictures and music on it. It's insane that a usb pendrive can hold data for that long!
During my last move I came across a box of my old floppy disks. (5.25 inch and 3.5 inch) Although these were all in perfect physical condition (being kept in a sealed box the entire time of their storage) They had been sitting for the best part of 40 years. Not a single one of those disks could be read anymore. Some of them I managed to format to make them useable again but this was just out of curiosity. Most of them couldn't even be low level formatted any more. Seems the magnetic coating on those disks was not too reliable.
@@KenFullman I had some Atari floppies in storage for 3 years. Not climate controlled. I have been able to read several with no problems. A few had 1 or 2 bad sectors.
I like this video. It got my curiosity up, so I dug out a box of old thumb/usb drives as well as ten year old (give or take a year or two or more) sata ssd drives that were used in car washes, pos's, etc. While it took about five days to go through them, none of them shown any loss of data. It blew my mind that they were more reliable than the spinning hard drives that I had stored, and went through because I was curious. out of the 87 various thumb drives and 32 ssd drives none were bad. Out of the 148 ide drives four were bad and out of the 59 sata drives 3 were bad, they were all stored in working condition. Thanks for the video, and now I got a "gonna do someday" project behind me.
I enjoyed the brief lecture on how ssds work. Upon seeing the title of this video I didnt realize that I dont really know how data is stored on ssds. Very informative!
Very good methodology. These kinds of videos are always interesting. And kudos on being able to resist checking them before the year is up. I couldn't do it, lol.
I had a CF card sitting there in it's container for around 20 years untouched. When I hooked it up to see what was on it... I still had all my photos. I had an SD card that went missing for me somehow. I found it well over 1 year later in the wash machine. It was still perfect and I am currently using it again now. If it can handle hundreds of washes in super hot water and then cold water... it's very durable.!
I found someone's cheap SD card in the dirt and snow on the street and it works perfectly clean. Although such cards very sensitive during writing, broken few by interruption and many fake on market from China.
@@fontenbleau Once in my life I bought a cheap card, thought they're all the same. it died 1/2 way through a trip. I said NEVER AGAIN. Since my CF card was SanDisk and it was always good. The one in the wash machine was a higher end SanDisk card. I bought the CF Card back in 2000-ish. It was $125 for a 125 Mega Bite Capacity! Now (because of that) I don't mind spending a bit for a card, they're all cheaper than that was!!
@@fontenbleauthat's funny you're mentioning China because I have a silicon power 32 gb micro SD card made in china that I bought in 2012 and I never had any data corruption and it's still working fine. It's currently in my Samsung galaxy a21s, that I use as a secondary phone
@@galaxiedance3135it's easy to spot cheap cards, they're for most part, not branded. SanDisk quality has also gone downhill recently and I prefer using Kingston instead
I started using SSD at work in around 2006. I'd backup configs and drivers to encrypted zips across two drives. Out of 24 drives. 2 are totally dead (I haven't tried logic analyser on actual chips yet), rest are fine . Mixture of IBM, Samsung, Fujitsu, Seagate, Kingston drives. Some I'd already re-purposed for RPI. All the SSDs from 2012 are still fine in the Last PC I built.
I've had laptops sitting around for years with SSDs and they booted just fine with all data intact many years later. About the only times I've ever heard about this happening was with MUCH lower quality flash chips.
No doubt. But the conundrum is that older SSD's were SLC or MLC which are more robust with more room for error. Modern SSD's in the last 5-8 years are primarily TLC or QLC which wear down more quickly and a small amount of data leakage can result in data corruption.
I data integrity to speed. Since I only use my rig for office and databases I am using a hdd. Has anyone tried a modem hdd? They are so underrated. I am currently booting my win 10 os in well under a minute
@@Boogie_the_cat Any hard drives manufactured 2020 or later. Especially helium drives. Capacity of 10TB is very affordable, but 15 upto 20TB is more expensive. They have average transfer of 256mb/s but with short stroking it is much higher. The data transfer is nice n steady unlike SSD which is hit n miss
@@addydiesel6627 I assume you mean "modern", and I like to keep hard drives around to keep mass amounts of data in one place. My laptop might be fully solid state, but my workstation(named Orion Mk. 9) has 20tb of hard drives supporting 6tb of NVMe and 4tb of SATA SSDs.
Excellent research, was really wondering how much an ssd would last un-powered. I messed up my company's laptop ssd and I'm on parental leave for about 2 years. So it seems that time is not on my side. I highly doubt even the cheapo ssd's will fail to retain data even after 2 years of being un-powered or even minimal data loss. Anyway great video!
Even a cheap USB flash drive will keep data for 10 years - an SSD will keep the data well beyond even that. SSD/HDD manufactures are very conservative when they state the data retention dates.
Cheapo USB flash drives invariably use cheap flash memories paired with cheap flash controllers. Multiple low standards, multiple points of failure. Which basically means that failure is almost guaranteed given enough time. I've had USB flash drives corrupt or lose data after just a few uses. All it takes is one failed cache write, one power failure, one operating system bluescreen - and data integrity is at risk. Good for moving files to another machine, otherwise untrustworthy. At least proper SSD drives (even external USB SSD drives) tend to have better silicon and better engineering. Along with failsafes built into the USB/PCIe/NVMe/M.2 protocols they use - and sometimes even onboard and offboard capacitors which can provide cache store and graceful shutdown in emergencies.
Had an ASUS tablet plus keyboard transformer like device not switched for almost 1.5 years and yep it lost it os drive and cannot boot. Flash soldered so haven't taken off yet to see what on them. Two other ASUS tablets, a win8 and android were still good with roughly the same power cying. All my ignored kindle readers one fire are all OK, but the batteries really don't like holding charge.
How long to flash bios chips last? I've got some 20 year old boards that are still going strong. It's not the same, but it's kinda the same. Ancient phones that have been collecting dust in a drawer will still power up no problem (on USB power) after years and years. That flash seems to survive just fine.
My dad recently found a micro SD card he lost in our gravel driveway. He plugged it in and it still had all the video footage from 2014 completely intact. Who knows how many times cars have driven over it and its been rained and snowed on during those 9 years!
Great stuff! It's pretty amazing how we've managed to store data in nano charges and on tiny chips. I thought vinyl was cool, but when we figured out magnettic tape and the various laser writing technology, things went crazy. Data storage in general is a fascinating and incredibly faceted topic. Keep up the great work!
Not only does QLC seem like a horrible deal but they are always trying to make it denser too. I know everyone wants more but they don't realize what they are asking for.
Yes, exactly. Many QLC SSD's are no faster than, or in many cases even slower than even a laptop hard drive. The only real benefit are fast seek times.
I get why years ago there was a push for QLC since at the time flash was still expensive, but boy has that changed now! In todays newegg email there was a teamgroup 4TB SATA TLC SSD for $137! At those prices it's not worth using QLC drives now, even though their performance is almost the same as TLC on SATA drives. But during those years of QLC development and improvement TLC wasn't standing still. They went from 32 layer to 64 to 96 to 128, and they say more layers will keep being added. What I would love to see happen is that now that flash has gotten so damn cheap, why not make 2 & 4TB drives that are made of 100% SLC NAND? So instead of how it is now where a small portion of a drive can be used as a SLC cache, and after it's full write speeds fall off a cliff, 100% of the drive would be able to write at full speed 100% of the time. Yes, it would cost more than the TLC drives we are using now, but these would allow the SSD makers to once again have their "halo" products like the Samsung Pro drives used to be for Samsung. People would pay more for 100% SLC drives like those that do 4K video editing since as you noted SLC has the highest write cycle endurance. I have a 240GB Samsung 840 EVO, which was the SSD that sparked the whole "Why are SSDs losing data when unpowered" frenzy many years ago. Samsung issued a software fix that they wouldn't say what it does to combat the problem. But that drive is still in this system and works fine, so whatever the fix was hasn't appeared to harm the drive. The rumor that went around was that it would "refresh" the nand by rewriting the drive over time. If true it must not do it excessively because the last time I looked at the drive health(which has been a year or so) it was at 99%.
@@radry100because it costs money. Chips cost per square millimetre to make. The packaging is a small part of the cost. The more you can store in a square millimetre the cheaper you can make an SSD of a given capacity.
I never really thought about this before I have just transferred over 3tb of movies from two hdds to my second nvme 4tb drive in my PC and i would have just left it like that forever, but, oh the reality, i must think again so thanks
The 1 year retention spec is a minimum based on end of life with all write cycles exhausted. SSDs with only a few cycles on them will retain data for far longer.
What impresses me is how much he blew the write cycles out of the water, and it's still perfectly fine. Definitely interested for the two year data hold next year.
Like the other commenters, I have also found super old thumb drives and such without any issues. My favorite is a little mini mp3 player I bought around 16 years ago. I put my entire library on it at the time and used it daily pretty much up until 2010 when I replaced it with my first smartphone. It has sat in various drawers and whatnot over the years and still works to this day.
Wow what a systematic and comorehensive testing you have done 👌. Appreciate all the efforts and time. I have fallen in love with this channel. So much advanced knowledge is available regarding storage and other topics. Keep it up. My best wishes
This is great to test. There are some considerations, however. Planar TLC drives are especially bad for cold(offline) storage, as 3D nand flash seems to have much better data retention characteristics across a worn drive. JEDEC specifications for TBW are intended to be performed with the drive half full for 75% of the writes, I believe? This is down from previous testing standards that required 80% or 90% full TBW ratings, which some of these drives are rated for. Colder operating temperatures for nand flash is more damaging for drive writes, as the electrons don't flow as easily into and out of the cell. Warm storage temperatures will also more quickly lose data, as the electrons more easily flow into and out of the cell. There are actually whitepapers on testing NAND flash of various kinds, though they're awfully hard to find these days. I've read parts of one such paper that suggest early(32 layer) TLC Nand flash has a data retention time of around 18~24 months depending on wear leveling, whereas planar TLC had something more like 3~18 months as I recall? But, my memory is hazy on the numbers. Planar data retention decreased linearly with wear, though, whereas stacked NAND for some reason beyond my understanding retains data much more consistently until much closer to cell failure. MLC has been used by Samsung to misleadingly describe 3bit and 4bit cells. Scummy samsung. In theory, the number of bits per cell should predictably decrease data retention time. Taking SLC as a value of 1, 2bit should be 0.5, 3bit 0.25, and 4bit 0.125. Older microSD or thumb drives can retain data offline for a very long time, because multi-level cell nand flash wasn't as available. Some of these may have not even used NAND flash at all. Some flash storage technologies can retain data for multiple decades reliably, making flash media technically the longest lasting electronic cold storage media, for very low-density storage.
Since there are so many comments on finding old working SSDs or thunmb drives, i have one example for the opposite. I had an old 128GB SSD from a thinkpad, built around 2015. That was powered off for about 2 or 3 years. Afterwards it was no longer bootable.
This is interesting and impressive. I am actually writing a review on NVM right now, and I'll state that the more common standard I see these days in academic work is 10-year retention, so you may see no degradation even after 4, but seeing it empirically confirmed is cool. Pivotal 10-year retention is always extrapolated from very accurate readings of the floating gate over smaller time periods, so I was unsure of that actually translates to real world success. Cool to see that it does even in cheap drives. Of course all these measures are statistical anyways, so you might always see a faulty device or just bad luck or have a gate hit with a cosmic ray or whatever, but even so the longevity improvements of modern SSDs is amazing.
I found a similar test to this on the internet, but it was a lot more comprehensive, and it included recording temperature and storage temperature. The higher the recording temperature, the longer the endurance; the lower the storage temperature, the longer the endurance, so you want to record hot and store cold. You can also use a parity archive tool, which uses a repair file to fix your corrupted files. The larger your repair file, the larger the amount of data you can fix. About once a year, I make an image of my hard drive which I put on an SSD, add a parity archive file (made with Multipar), and store the whole thing in the freezer. I could be wrong, but I reckon that shold be safe for a minimum of 5 years, perhaps even 10.
Each one of those gates is like a mini battery, holding a cluster of electrons as a charge.... If you toss a battery into the freezer then that's gonna go flat real soon. I don't know why or how your strategy could work, but I hope for your data's sake that you're right. I'm not confident about my 1:1 comparison of battery:NANDflash transistor either, but one of us is gonna be right in the end haha.
Nice. I am sure it will last very long. Otherwise we would be hearing more widespread issue from people about this. I do not think being unpowered changes anything really compared to being powered and not being written / read in particular pages / bits. Maybe it is related to temperature. Also according to JEDEC, there are derating tables, that depend on active use temperature and offline temperature. With higher active temp, and lower offline temp, helping prolong retention. A lot, sometimes by a factor of 10 times. On the other hand I did not see many experimental publications on it either, so it would be interesting to see more results. I have a server rack with few servers at home. Two of these servers I unpowered about 4-5 years ago, and they are offline. They are mostly storage servers with spinning rust, but boot drives are 2x SAMSUNG PRO SATA SSD drives in one, and 2x Crucial MX500 in the other. Or something like that. Before unpowering they were running for about 6-7 years. Not much load on SSDs, or too important data. Just usual Linux updates, some logs in /var, etc. So maybe 30GB written during their entire life. I should power them up, and check out. I do have also an old laptop with SSD, that I maybe power once a year, with pretty old drive, and it is still working perfectly.
A question I have not seen answered yet is, "how long do I need to power the drive on for to refresh the cell charges/data integrity?" Is it a case of just powering the drive on for a few seconds, a few days, or do the actual files need to be rewritten? Or does permanent damage occur to the drive's data retention ability when left powered off?
What I've read is that it's advisable to either copy the data to a fresh drive when in doubt, or to run a full diagnostic on it so it's basically forced to address all the bits at least once. I that won't refresh the trapped charge I don't know what will.
I never really gave this a thought. But I just dug out an old laptop that has an SSD that has not been turned on for at least 3 years and it booted without issue.
Good to hear. It seems there's a lot of unfounded fear online about SSD long term storage. However, there is no substitute for a proper backup to keep your data safe.
just recalled that I have a 512G ssd just sitting somewhere with some cold data. I would love to move them to HDD's but because of other reasons cant really afford more now haha. I need to check if it's still having my data. It probably is not powered for just like 8 months now but eh
Man, awesome video, couldn't stop watching, and thoroughly explained. Good job! I know it's your own pocket money but I wonder if also testing some TLC and QLC would have surfaced something.
Probably no need to continue the test year after year. The data storage will out live us leaving perfect data intact. That's the nature of molecular charged states. Metallic hard disks also will last for many years but already fading away just like the Model T Ford did.
They do tend to slow down with old stale data before they lose the data. ECC just kicks in more and more. I've seen that symptom countless times on high end name brand SSD's all the way to generic. The better drives of course will re-write a borderline sector if ECC worked a bit too hard. Moving the sector as a last resort. Point being is some drives might never lose any data if you read them each year. Too hard to call, too many controllers on the market. Good luck.
as you note, TLC has an endurance of about 3k cycles, so your 128G SSDs should have a rating of about 385TB, and you took them to 280 or less. I don't know where the endurance rating of 60TB would come from - that sounds like QLC, actually. thanks for doing this, even if it turns out not to be quite the worst-case you were aiming for...
Good point. I made an error. Newest JS600 SSD's seem to be QLC with 60TB TBW for the 128GB version: www.leven.com.tw/en/ssd/view/JS600-128GB But original were labeled as TLC, and Leven confirmed 1000-3000 P/E cycles. Images for clarification: imgur.com/a/IkBmwf1
@@htwingnutback in November 2012 when I bought my LG Optimus l5 running android 4.0.3, I bought a silicon power (made in china) 32 gb micro SD card which was a class 4 speed card, pretty much common back in the days. I used it a lot and even though, it's now slow, it still works perfectly after eleven years. Some people just love to put fake information on the internet like how SSD couldn't be trusted and how HDDs are great when it's the other way around
This is nice that someone is doing actual practical test for the science and for all of us. IMHO, if a SSD survives in normal daily use for 10 years, that is great. I mean literally a normal use, that is very light use compared to daily PC gamers or who will produce multiple gigabytes of data per day. If a SSD can't maintain data for 5-10 years just by sitting on shelf, that is serious problem. And HDD is way to go.
I have seen drives losing their data after just 3-4 years.... some friends didnt listen and just stored their photos on an SSD and when it was full just shelved it. Now they regret it but there is basically nothing you can do at that point - many of the images were corrupted (like serious double-digit percentage). Also by reading the entire drive the controllers will check the voltage-level and depending on the manufacturer/model already start refreshing the data. Some years ago Samsung had the problem that their entrylevel SSDs had some serious performance and integrity degradation and the fix was that the controller would permanently monitor the sectors and re-write them if there were too many nearby reads and after some time-interval. Pretty sure since then most SSDs have implemented something similar as that was like 10 years ago already.
Still though, that is a very good point on why to not keep a backup on just one type of storage media and also why it may be best to avoid buying the cheapest SSDs. 1000 write cycles is not really a lot at all.
Early SSD were not exactly known for reliability, controller issues of big brands like Samsung were in IT news almost every day about ~13 years ago. The situation has improved a lot.
Nice experiment. But wouldn't you test two years without power like this about three times? After one year, you power the first set up, so they are basically reset. You check the same set again after (initial experiment start + 3 years), which is only two years after they last have been powered on. And that is also the time frame for the second set. Same goes if the three years would start after the first year, which makes four years. could you elaborate please? How do you actually factor in the reset of power levels during your tests? Or are they not reset, because no data is written to them?
When you plug it in, it doesn't "reset" or "refresh" the cells. SSD's have to write at the page or block level. This would take a lot of time to "refresh" the cells, at least as much time as it takes to write to the entire SSD. The SSD does not know how log it's been unpowered. The only thing that would trigger it would be the wear leveling algorithm or garbage collection. But those usually require some form of file addition or deletion.
@@htwingnut Thank you for the answer it makes sense. So basically your test is to check data integrity but if you take a brand new SSD, it should still work in 5 years even without power ? You would just lose your data ? The SSD would be still functional ? (if we assume actual material decay is negligible)
ChatGPT: For consumer-grade SSDs, you can generally expect data retention periods of 1 to 2 years at a minimum, with many exceeding 5 years if stored under typical conditions. For enterprise-grade SSDs and high-quality, well-maintained SSDs, you can often expect data retention periods of 5 to 10 years or longer.
Thank you. I also asked ChatGPT and got a similar answer. However I also asked if it could site source references and it said this was from general consensus. Not to mention, those spans are for SSD's within TBW ratings not 3-4x the TBW rating. Also, the Jedec standard indicates the opposite. Enterprise disks tend to be run harder and longer and hotter as well as stored in higher temps and indicate data retention less than a year.
finding old usbs, cds, floppy discs, etc. is always something magical. what will be on it? childhood games? family photos? a pack of install discs for windows ME and some proprietary software for a company long dead? porn? of course, you run into some corrupted stuff. for me its always the fun things that are corrupted, usually old games. but for the most part these things (aside from things like casettes, vhs tapes, and 8 tracks especially) dont really age. they just sit in storage until you are brave enough to read them again.
I just found a crucial c300 64GB that I remember buying in 2009, I used it until 2016 when I installed windows 98 on it . I just recently pressed it back to service in the retro pc using windows 98 and it retained all the data I had on it in storage between 2016-2023! Not any losses, boots up fine
I own SanDisk SSD from 2012 and it was only 240GB capacity. It still works to this day with 95% health remaining in SSD info And yes it's being used daily for over 11 years. Simplest way to prolong SSD longevity, always make sure it never reach high temperature. I intentionally limiting the SSD speed to 20 MBps whenever copying or writing large data. Don't forget that 20 MBps is 160 Mbps because Byte vs Bit. 160 Mbps is still good enough to write 4K 60 fps video file in real-time
I understand that the temperature at the time of data being written also has an impact on powered off data retention time, general idea being that low write temperature = bad, high write temperature = good, while storage temperature is opposite - low storage temperature = good, high storage temperature = bad. Did you come across this in your research?
I came across this: An end of life device (i.e maxed out on writes) when stored at 10 C was good for about 75 years if written at 55 C. The JEDEC standard says that a "client" device written at 55 C and stored at 25 C should be good for 7.75 years, but if written at 25 C it is only guaranteed good for about one year. Who knew? Well Intel actually. They provided the data to JEDEC.
My question is: when left unpowered, no charges can be refreshed (obviously); but what happens on that initial power up, after the storage period? Does the controller set to actively refreshing all the stored charges? It might be interesting to see the power data (of course SSDs are quite power efficient, one would need precise equipment to measure that) of a drive that is in regular use at boot or wake from standby, compared with a drive that has been stored for a year or more.
Measuring power draw is a clever way to figure out whether it's doing refreshing at power. Store the drive at a high temperature (e.g. 50C) to accelerate data degradation and speed up testing. Some SATA drives record NAND writes in addition to host writes (e.g. Samsung enterprise drives), so that would be an easier way to see refreshing it's doing.
The Intel 2.5" enterprise/datacenter-class 256K SATA3 SSD that I used as my primary/boot drive in my 2015-2019 build sat in a box from 2019 to 2024. I recently put it into a 2.5" USB enclosure & all the data is still intact & it works fine. Also to note that approx. 4 years of use in my 2015 active daily-use gaming/home system only used approx. 1.5% of it's stated endurance rating (1700 TBW) for writes. These sorts of professional-grade, higher-end component SSD's are worth the extra money IMO just for the ultra-reliability peace-of-mind. Intel sold their SSD business to Solidigm some years back & those are the types enterprise-class SSD drives that I have also used in both my 2019 & current in-progress 2024 systems (both M.2 form factor & 2.5" SATA3 versions). Love them.
Hey, man, I appreciate the experiment and the video. Nice, dilligent, professional work you did there! No non-sense, too. 👍🏻 A quick side-question: What is the rack/external bay you're using there? It caught my eye instantly. Thanks!
I thought I lost my usb drive. 7 years later I found it under my car seat. Might have slip out of pocket while driving. Data still intact after 7 years of brutal environment inside car, hot, cold.
I have had a USB flash drive in my car for years and it is about 15 years old (4GB) but its for mp3´s for the car stereo and since i drive very little its seldom even powered up and i have had no problems and here in Stockholm Sweden the outside temperature can be over 30 degres C in the summer (much more in the car) and -20-25 in the winter in the worst cases and also quite humid.
USD driver is HDD not SDD 🤦
@@privateassman8839It's still based off NAND tho
@@privateassman8839 🤦hdd is hard disk drive which is the thing with the spinning disks
@@privateassman8839 It's flash memory, i.e. the same tech as an SSD. So not a hard drive, not sure why you are so confidently wrong?
The oldest SSD I have checked was a 128MB thumb from 2005, lost since then in my junk drawer, until I FINALLY cleaned it out (almost 100% useless stuff). It was filled with pictures, videos, and documents I thought I had lost forever. It was fine. BTW, back then, that 128MB thumb drive sold for $18 at Target, which was a real bargain at the time.
$18 was pretty good tbh.
Thats a flash drive not an SSD lol. Very similar, SSDs use flash memory, but theyre a bit more complex on the inside than a thumb drive.
People are always super doom and gloom abkut flash media, SD cards etc over time. Its way overblown. If you dont abuse them and write read too often, theyll likely last a long time. Ive got SD cards that have been in devices with ocassional uae for like 15y and it still works fine.
I've still got a 32MB microSD card. I bet that was advanced at the time.
That's an SLC, 🥇 gold
Crazy to think about the fact that few years ago I paid around the same prize for 128gb thumb drive
What I'm actually surprised by is the fact that those 70TBW SSDs survived 280TBW. That's impressive
70TBW is guaranteed number
@@GewelReal yeah I see now. It would take at least decade of normal use to get there even, so this is reassuring
Crucial is the commercial trademark that can last the most, its really fucking impressive.
@@Usernameblank9891 It’s _crucial_ for drives to store data as long as possible
@@Usernameblank9891Really depends. Their P4 Plus ist really limited compared to size.
I read somewhere that modern NAND flash is almost immortal when run in SLC mode, since the charge level in the floating gate always remains far below spec, leakage at those levels is miniscule, and signal processing is way easier when the controller only has to check for the presence or absence of a charge. Though using SLC flash for bulk long term storage would be pretty silly for most applications due to the price.
By the way, this video was a pretty good reminder to power up some of my old forgotten devices to keep their little machine spirits from starving to death.
You can buy a SLC ssd for about the price of a hard drive up to 2TB. Silicon Power makes some decent SSD's.
@@JessicaFEREM Thats for sure not SLC, you are probably reading some advertisement bs like "SLC Cache" and other stuff they shove into names to make you think its something better. All it means is that your TLC cells are used as a cache in SLC mode meaning that your drive is only fast when empty because they didn't want to include actual cache on the drive.
The fact is that although real SLC is rare and expensive it is worth it to those who need speed and longevity. I would still very strongly advise against storing any important data on just one storage medium type. Ideally the more important it is the more copies there should be as well as a diversity in the type of media. This way if one copy is bad you hopefully still have good ones left. This can be for personal documents that don't get shared with ANYONE or with ones that you do share for various reasons. Also if the documents backed up were scans of any paper copies keep them too. That just gives you one more backup even though there may be more labor in scanning them again. Then if all else fails hopefully you still have the paper copies. Just remember to store them in a cool dry place where insects will not get in and destroy them. Some people may think that multiple backups is overkill but they don't realize that keeping those is a good idea. They are just cynical and think it is more money and while drives are not free they are surprisingly cheap these days. A 1 TB 2.5 inch hard drive was just a bit over $50 for me after taxes.
Even the MLC SSD nowadays is almost impossible to find in ordinary consumer market and only limited to server/data center level
If I could reflash my 512GB MLC to become 128G SLC, I would definitely do that!
Add to the statistics pile... I have an SSD as a boot drive in a rack server. I powered the machine down in the summer of 2016. Not expecting anything, I booted it back up about a month ago (2023) - so it had just sat for 7 years - and it was perfect! Everything fired up like nothing had happened.
For clearance you would have to make sure the hashes are matched, but ig it counts as a test.
Appreciate the time and effort you are taking to conduct these tests! Looking for to the next results.
I was going to comment on how useless a one year video would be (anyone who has known what an SSD is for more than a decade knows that they can safely expect one to last way way longer) but then it occurred to me: what if all the SSDs and flash drives that we have that have retained data for a decade or more have done so because they are a decade or more in age? What if modern SSDs are much worse? Thank you for this series.
I agree. You would need to have decades of drives to do this test and by then the units would be obsolete. Its a nice thought. I have a box full of old thumbdrives that i will probably never use, but when i go to look at one for making a giveaway content, i have to move data that has been sitting there for years and years (sometimes over 10yrs). I don't see data loss. Furthermore this test would be rendered useless unless people bought the same drives as you. I would for maintenance if just pluging in the drive is good enough, or you should move it to refresh it (ie does plugging it in refresh the state of all bytes to max) this test should be doable in some way.
I did buy SSD in the year 2011, but it didn't survive power surge. It took me a decade to buy another SSD, because data reliability is much more important than speed. However I also have an USB stick, which I bought in the same time and there are some MP3s in it. I tried to listen them this year and while you can still access them, some of them are corrupted. The corrupted data isn't constant. Part of the songs are all right and part of the songs have cracking sounds in it.
I was rather shocked to see the _manufacturer_ only claims a year! I'm certainly not going SSD any time soon!
I've got an old Kingston HyperX 2.5 that I still use to this day on random machines for a donor boot drive, etc. It's wearing down according to the S.M.A.R.T report, but still well within usable range even after ... 11 years.
But it does have some issues it appears in some part of it from time to time, and having (I think) identified the problem area of the memory in software side of things; I tend to just format around the sectors via byte based formatting.
Works like a charm after that, for the most part.
Meanwhile, some western digital m.2's I bought not even a couple years ago in total between them all have failing life spans despite being generally well taken care of. One of them outright failed I think in a bad enough way that it corrupted all sorts of boot files that to the best of my ability at least cannot be fixed without serious risk to the rest of the data on the device.
Sure, failures happen. But the other 2 similar m.2 drives I have aside from that one that failed; also have failing life spans already too.
Not a good look for WD from my angle.
Current machine being used has 2 P1600X optane m.2 drives. Low storage capacity, but so far absolutely zero issues. A little slower than the absolute fastest stuff out there now I admit; but stable as stable by definition gets as far as I am seeing so far. I've had these for about half a year so far. The WD's already started showing degradation by this point.
I love it. I might spring for the 500$ 960 GB U.2 version instead. (on sale right now.) If it's just as reliable as its m.2 smaller version, then I am quite happy to pay that much, and more; to go with a Raid 60? setup perhaps?.
Anyways. Aside from all of that; Samsung evo 2.5 drives seem to do well as far as I care so far as well. I've had a few in the past, but they got sold with other machines I built for people who didn't want to spend a lot on a new drive. Zero'd the data on those drives for them, did a test or two for reliability insurances, and didn't see any reason to not pass them on for a lower cost. Can't say for certain how long those are lasting those customers in the past, but based on how well my kingston one is doing and how well my other samsung 2.5's have done over the past decade prior to each's own sale as second hand; I suspect they are probably still working to this day. Aside from catastrophe somehow. I suspect my new 2TB one will probably last a decade before replacing it becomes a concern at all. Smart data on all my 2.5's of samsung brand in the past basically still had 97+% life span left prior to selling as used.
What else... oh; haven't booted up my other newest m.2 from samsung yet; cause the pro drives apparently need a firmware update right away prior to real use or you suffer a ridiculous drop in lifespan for the drive. no thanks.
So, I'm considering getting another optane drive for booting for that machine, and fix the samsung drive that way first before letting it get real use. Slight cost to the wallet, that mostly can be justified by just how stable those optane drives seem to be as boot drives.
Seriously. I can't begin to explain just how nice and stable this setup has been with them.
You can flip a loooot of bits in a file before you notice its corrupt.
I have a couple of 60GB slc ssd drives of 13 years old, not powered on for at least 10 years. Data was still fine and one drive still worked perfectly. One has become really slow, like 100KB/s write speed. These were used in a server and cost 750 euros a piece. It ran an intensive database application.
I use 2x 8TB qlc ssd drives for storage and backup every 1-3 months for 9 months now, so far no issues. The backup is powered off and stored at a differend location.
Check the SMART info on that slow one. When SSDs have used up all their hot swap cells they tend to drop the write speed way down to prompt people to back it up before it dies. Some SSDs when they fail will block writing completely. Some SSDs will self brick and make themselves unreadable so you data is inaccessible.
@@greggv8 that drive didn't have diagnostics I could read, maybe a proprietary tool would be able to but I'm not sure.
@@imqqmi From my experience the data in those flash drives outlasts the functionality of the controllers. All the broken SSD's I encountered had a dead flash controller.
For craps and giggles you could just wipe the slow drive and try to write then see if the performance returns to normal as some have experienced with some models of Samsung drives.
@@MrKillswitch88 would be worth a try because many SSDs slow a lot when they're over 50% full
I just found a 12-year old USB drive recently.. a rabbit-themed Chinese New Year exclusive Kingston USB drive with a whopping 8GB storage, which was top of the line back in the day. Coincidentally this year it's the Year of the Rabbit as well, so it has come full circle. Worked fine. My files and backups from 12 years ago are still in there, and when viewed based on detailed properties they're all still showing that they're created or last modified 12 years ago!
Crazy how humans managed to create such micro architecture and it still managed to surpass over 4 times it's manufactured limit. Kinda mind boggling. Also great experiment, and an informative video about digital data storage to boot. Love to see more!
Think that's crazy back in 2015 TechReport had a Samsun 840 PRO reaching over 2.4 PB written without error which is 33 times its rated limit of 73 TBW, and in 2017 a German outlet had a 850 Pro 250 GB last a whopping 9.1 PB before dying which is 60 times its rated limit of 150 TBW.
Since SSD's, they are dancing to prevent parallel architecture. Every storage chip should be part of a "striping RAID" by default, pulling 100% of the available bus bandwidth for data transfer. The whole storage market became a collective scam.
wow, succinct, no bs, no flashy garbo, just a simple, concise, and effective presentation. thank you sir.
This valuable research. Thanks for the time you spent so far on this. Keep on going! We are watching!
Thanks a ton. This is a really valuable underrated experiment and I'm grateful that you have the patience and the go to try this.
Very cool. Just one thing I'd recommend: Write the data in a raw format to the SSD. I don't know how to do this in Windows but on Unix systems, for example on Linux, you can copy the bytes coming from /dev/urandom onto the SSD directly (without filesystem or partition table) and just calculate the hash of that.
For example:
sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdc bs=2M oflag=sync status=progress
sudo sha256sum /dev/sdc # this will print the SHA256 hash
Then later you can just calculate that one hash again and determine if anything changed much more easily, without a filesystem. And it would also be more accurate since you're checking every single byte.
You're right, he should test for absolute changes. Filesystems and the like often have error correction which could interfere with these tests.
@@HappyGick most filesystems don't have data checksums (ZFS does, but FAT certainly doesn't). the real issue is that all SSD firmware actually uses a redundant encoding for blocks, and you can't count on being able to read data before it's been corrected.
so the hashing is probably pointless: the firmware is already detecting and correcting corruption, and won't return incorrect blocks (will return an error instead).
@@markhahn0 Then these tests would measure how recoverable an SSD is after it's been unused for years. There's no way to measure absolute changes.
It's really weird how the UA-cam algorithm works. I normally don't watch videos with only 40 views, but this one piqued my interest.
Great video! I'm looking forward to future updates. See you again in the coming years. :D
Hey, glad you liked it. Thanks for the positive comments.
I lost a Sandisk USB pendrive, 16gb, somewhere around the house, i moved 3 times during that time, i find it with the last move i made, it was stuck under a flap of a box of random stuff! Ow, how long was this pendrive lost? About 10 years, yeah, crazy, i know! And did it still had anything on it? Yes, yes it conserved all the data wonderfully, it had some pictures and music on it. It's insane that a usb pendrive can hold data for that long!
During my last move I came across a box of my old floppy disks. (5.25 inch and 3.5 inch) Although these were all in perfect physical condition (being kept in a sealed box the entire time of their storage) They had been sitting for the best part of 40 years. Not a single one of those disks could be read anymore. Some of them I managed to format to make them useable again but this was just out of curiosity. Most of them couldn't even be low level formatted any more. Seems the magnetic coating on those disks was not too reliable.
Not the same kind of memory.
@@KenFullman I had some Atari floppies in storage for 3 years. Not climate controlled. I have been able to read several with no problems. A few had 1 or 2 bad sectors.
@@KenFullman technically the only way that should’ve happened is if they were exposed to any some sort of magnetic field while they were in storage
Yup, the data is just not there yet. But with experiments like in this video we will get there.
I like this video. It got my curiosity up, so I dug out a box of old thumb/usb drives as well as ten year old (give or take a year or two or more) sata ssd drives that were used in car washes, pos's, etc. While it took about five days to go through them, none of them shown any loss of data. It blew my mind that they were more reliable than the spinning hard drives that I had stored, and went through because I was curious. out of the 87 various thumb drives and 32 ssd drives none were bad. Out of the 148 ide drives four were bad and out of the 59 sata drives 3 were bad, they were all stored in working condition. Thanks for the video, and now I got a "gonna do someday" project behind me.
I enjoyed the brief lecture on how ssds work. Upon seeing the title of this video I didnt realize that I dont really know how data is stored on ssds. Very informative!
An absolute wonderful, gem of a video. Loved to see the long term planned video, this what makes the Internet so incredible.
Very good methodology. These kinds of videos are always interesting. And kudos on being able to resist checking them before the year is up. I couldn't do it, lol.
it's very satisfying to see the proof in the pudding. thanks for running these tests and making the video
Thank you for your contribution. Experiments like these are hard to come by and very interesting to me.
This is seriously incredible. What a wonderful experiment. Thank you for doing this!
I had a CF card sitting there in it's container for around 20 years untouched. When I hooked it up to see what was on it... I still had all my photos. I had an SD card that went missing for me somehow. I found it well over 1 year later in the wash machine. It was still perfect and I am currently using it again now. If it can handle hundreds of washes in super hot water and then cold water... it's very durable.!
I found someone's cheap SD card in the dirt and snow on the street and it works perfectly clean. Although such cards very sensitive during writing, broken few by interruption and many fake on market from China.
@@fontenbleau Once in my life I bought a cheap card, thought they're all the same. it died 1/2 way through a trip. I said NEVER AGAIN. Since my CF card was SanDisk and it was always good. The one in the wash machine was a higher end SanDisk card. I bought the CF Card back in 2000-ish. It was $125 for a 125 Mega Bite Capacity! Now (because of that) I don't mind spending a bit for a card, they're all cheaper than that was!!
@@fontenbleauthat's funny you're mentioning China because I have a silicon power 32 gb micro SD card made in china that I bought in 2012 and I never had any data corruption and it's still working fine. It's currently in my Samsung galaxy a21s, that I use as a secondary phone
@@galaxiedance3135it's easy to spot cheap cards, they're for most part, not branded. SanDisk quality has also gone downhill recently and I prefer using Kingston instead
Interesting. Subscribed to see the results next year
Thanks for making this. Super interesting stuff.
This is something I wondered about too many times and couldnt find a good answer or even a test for that matter. Thank you so much.
Cool experiment 😉. thanks!
I started using SSD at work in around 2006. I'd backup configs and drivers to encrypted zips across two drives.
Out of 24 drives. 2 are totally dead (I haven't tried logic analyser on actual chips yet), rest are fine . Mixture of IBM, Samsung, Fujitsu, Seagate, Kingston drives. Some I'd already re-purposed for RPI. All the SSDs from 2012 are still fine in the Last PC I built.
I've had laptops sitting around for years with SSDs and they booted just fine with all data intact many years later. About the only times I've ever heard about this happening was with MUCH lower quality flash chips.
No doubt. But the conundrum is that older SSD's were SLC or MLC which are more robust with more room for error. Modern SSD's in the last 5-8 years are primarily TLC or QLC which wear down more quickly and a small amount of data leakage can result in data corruption.
I data integrity to speed. Since I only use my rig for office and databases I am using a hdd. Has anyone tried a modem hdd? They are so underrated. I am currently booting my win 10 os in well under a minute
@@addydiesel6627what is a modem HDD?
@@Boogie_the_cat Any hard drives manufactured 2020 or later. Especially helium drives. Capacity of 10TB is very affordable, but 15 upto 20TB is more expensive. They have average transfer of 256mb/s but with short stroking it is much higher. The data transfer is nice n steady unlike SSD which is hit n miss
@@addydiesel6627 I assume you mean "modern", and I like to keep hard drives around to keep mass amounts of data in one place. My laptop might be fully solid state, but my workstation(named Orion Mk. 9) has 20tb of hard drives supporting 6tb of NVMe and 4tb of SATA SSDs.
AWESOME - thank you for doing these types of tests!
Excellent research, was really wondering how much an ssd would last un-powered. I messed up my company's laptop ssd and I'm on parental leave for about 2 years. So it seems that time is not on my side. I highly doubt even the cheapo ssd's will fail to retain data even after 2 years of being un-powered or even minimal data loss. Anyway great video!
Even a cheap USB flash drive will keep data for 10 years - an SSD will keep the data well beyond even that. SSD/HDD manufactures are very conservative when they state the data retention dates.
@@lophilip Got any proof of that?
Cheapo USB flash drives invariably use cheap flash memories paired with cheap flash controllers. Multiple low standards, multiple points of failure. Which basically means that failure is almost guaranteed given enough time.
I've had USB flash drives corrupt or lose data after just a few uses. All it takes is one failed cache write, one power failure, one operating system bluescreen - and data integrity is at risk. Good for moving files to another machine, otherwise untrustworthy.
At least proper SSD drives (even external USB SSD drives) tend to have better silicon and better engineering. Along with failsafes built into the USB/PCIe/NVMe/M.2 protocols they use - and sometimes even onboard and offboard capacitors which can provide cache store and graceful shutdown in emergencies.
Had an ASUS tablet plus keyboard transformer like device not switched for almost 1.5 years and yep it lost it os drive and cannot boot. Flash soldered so haven't taken off yet to see what on them. Two other ASUS tablets, a win8 and android were still good with roughly the same power cying. All my ignored kindle readers one fire are all OK, but the batteries really don't like holding charge.
How long to flash bios chips last? I've got some 20 year old boards that are still going strong. It's not the same, but it's kinda the same.
Ancient phones that have been collecting dust in a drawer will still power up no problem (on USB power) after years and years. That flash seems to survive just fine.
Interesting test! See you next year!
Keep up the good work. I appreciate your deep dives.
My dad recently found a micro SD card he lost in our gravel driveway. He plugged it in and it still had all the video footage from 2014 completely intact. Who knows how many times cars have driven over it and its been rained and snowed on during those 9 years!
Well, wow! A test that takes 3 years to finish, thanks for doing this!
Still amazes me how much information we can get on such a small scale
Great stuff! It's pretty amazing how we've managed to store data in nano charges and on tiny chips. I thought vinyl was cool, but when we figured out magnettic tape and the various laser writing technology, things went crazy.
Data storage in general is a fascinating and incredibly faceted topic.
Keep up the great work!
Really nice to see someone testing this. Hope to see findings in a year.
Not only does QLC seem like a horrible deal but they are always trying to make it denser too. I know everyone wants more but they don't realize what they are asking for.
Yes, exactly. Many QLC SSD's are no faster than, or in many cases even slower than even a laptop hard drive. The only real benefit are fast seek times.
I get why years ago there was a push for QLC since at the time flash was still expensive, but boy has that changed now! In todays newegg email there was a teamgroup 4TB SATA TLC SSD for $137! At those prices it's not worth using QLC drives now, even though their performance is almost the same as TLC on SATA drives. But during those years of QLC development and improvement TLC wasn't standing still. They went from 32 layer to 64 to 96 to 128, and they say more layers will keep being added. What I would love to see happen is that now that flash has gotten so damn cheap, why not make 2 & 4TB drives that are made of 100% SLC NAND? So instead of how it is now where a small portion of a drive can be used as a SLC cache, and after it's full write speeds fall off a cliff, 100% of the drive would be able to write at full speed 100% of the time. Yes, it would cost more than the TLC drives we are using now, but these would allow the SSD makers to once again have their "halo" products like the Samsung Pro drives used to be for Samsung. People would pay more for 100% SLC drives like those that do 4K video editing since as you noted SLC has the highest write cycle endurance.
I have a 240GB Samsung 840 EVO, which was the SSD that sparked the whole "Why are SSDs losing data when unpowered" frenzy many years ago. Samsung issued a software fix that they wouldn't say what it does to combat the problem. But that drive is still in this system and works fine, so whatever the fix was hasn't appeared to harm the drive. The rumor that went around was that it would "refresh" the nand by rewriting the drive over time. If true it must not do it excessively because the last time I looked at the drive health(which has been a year or so) it was at 99%.
2.5" SSD are mostly empty space, so why not pack more chips inside which are less dense? Problem solved.
@@radry100because it costs money. Chips cost per square millimetre to make. The packaging is a small part of the cost. The more you can store in a square millimetre the cheaper you can make an SSD of a given capacity.
Oh yes they do. They really don't care. "But it's still going to last longer than you will". No, not every ssd lasts people 100 years, dudes.
I never really thought about this before I have just transferred over 3tb of movies from two hdds to my second nvme 4tb drive in my PC and i would have just left it like that forever, but, oh the reality, i must think again so thanks
This has been immensely useful info as it's extremely rare to find such long-term experiments. Eased my mind quite a bit as well, thanks!
The 1 year retention spec is a minimum based on end of life with all write cycles exhausted. SSDs with only a few cycles on them will retain data for far longer.
What impresses me is how much he blew the write cycles out of the water, and it's still perfectly fine. Definitely interested for the two year data hold next year.
Like the other commenters, I have also found super old thumb drives and such without any issues. My favorite is a little mini mp3 player I bought around 16 years ago. I put my entire library on it at the time and used it daily pretty much up until 2010 when I replaced it with my first smartphone. It has sat in various drawers and whatnot over the years and still works to this day.
Wow what a systematic and comorehensive testing you have done 👌. Appreciate all the efforts and time. I have fallen in love with this channel. So much advanced knowledge is available regarding storage and other topics.
Keep it up. My best wishes
Nice experiment! Well planned and prepared! W8ing for upcoming results.
Thank you for doing this -- it is appreciated :)
This is great to test. There are some considerations, however.
Planar TLC drives are especially bad for cold(offline) storage, as 3D nand flash seems to have much better data retention characteristics across a worn drive.
JEDEC specifications for TBW are intended to be performed with the drive half full for 75% of the writes, I believe? This is down from previous testing standards that required 80% or 90% full TBW ratings, which some of these drives are rated for.
Colder operating temperatures for nand flash is more damaging for drive writes, as the electrons don't flow as easily into and out of the cell. Warm storage temperatures will also more quickly lose data, as the electrons more easily flow into and out of the cell.
There are actually whitepapers on testing NAND flash of various kinds, though they're awfully hard to find these days. I've read parts of one such paper that suggest early(32 layer) TLC Nand flash has a data retention time of around 18~24 months depending on wear leveling, whereas planar TLC had something more like 3~18 months as I recall? But, my memory is hazy on the numbers. Planar data retention decreased linearly with wear, though, whereas stacked NAND for some reason beyond my understanding retains data much more consistently until much closer to cell failure.
MLC has been used by Samsung to misleadingly describe 3bit and 4bit cells. Scummy samsung.
In theory, the number of bits per cell should predictably decrease data retention time. Taking SLC as a value of 1, 2bit should be 0.5, 3bit 0.25, and 4bit 0.125.
Older microSD or thumb drives can retain data offline for a very long time, because multi-level cell nand flash wasn't as available. Some of these may have not even used NAND flash at all. Some flash storage technologies can retain data for multiple decades reliably, making flash media technically the longest lasting electronic cold storage media, for very low-density storage.
Good to know. Thank you for this test! Appreciate it
Since there are so many comments on finding old working SSDs or thunmb drives, i have one example for the opposite. I had an old 128GB SSD from a thinkpad, built around 2015. That was powered off for about 2 or 3 years. Afterwards it was no longer bootable.
very cool effort ❤, thanks !
This is interesting and impressive. I am actually writing a review on NVM right now, and I'll state that the more common standard I see these days in academic work is 10-year retention, so you may see no degradation even after 4, but seeing it empirically confirmed is cool. Pivotal 10-year retention is always extrapolated from very accurate readings of the floating gate over smaller time periods, so I was unsure of that actually translates to real world success. Cool to see that it does even in cheap drives. Of course all these measures are statistical anyways, so you might always see a faulty device or just bad luck or have a gate hit with a cosmic ray or whatever, but even so the longevity improvements of modern SSDs is amazing.
Nice! Waiting for the update!
I found a similar test to this on the internet, but it was a lot more comprehensive, and it included recording temperature and storage temperature. The higher the recording temperature, the longer the endurance; the lower the storage temperature, the longer the endurance, so you want to record hot and store cold. You can also use a parity archive tool, which uses a repair file to fix your corrupted files. The larger your repair file, the larger the amount of data you can fix. About once a year, I make an image of my hard drive which I put on an SSD, add a parity archive file (made with Multipar), and store the whole thing in the freezer. I could be wrong, but I reckon that shold be safe for a minimum of 5 years, perhaps even 10.
Each one of those gates is like a mini battery, holding a cluster of electrons as a charge....
If you toss a battery into the freezer then that's gonna go flat real soon.
I don't know why or how your strategy could work, but I hope for your data's sake that you're right.
I'm not confident about my 1:1 comparison of battery:NANDflash transistor either, but one of us is gonna be right in the end haha.
@@Yezpahrbatteries rely on chemical reactions. NANDs not so much.
Great research, brother. I'm sure it will make many computer-nerds like meself sleep better at night.
Nice. I am sure it will last very long. Otherwise we would be hearing more widespread issue from people about this. I do not think being unpowered changes anything really compared to being powered and not being written / read in particular pages / bits. Maybe it is related to temperature. Also according to JEDEC, there are derating tables, that depend on active use temperature and offline temperature. With higher active temp, and lower offline temp, helping prolong retention. A lot, sometimes by a factor of 10 times.
On the other hand I did not see many experimental publications on it either, so it would be interesting to see more results.
I have a server rack with few servers at home. Two of these servers I unpowered about 4-5 years ago, and they are offline. They are mostly storage servers with spinning rust, but boot drives are 2x SAMSUNG PRO SATA SSD drives in one, and 2x Crucial MX500 in the other. Or something like that. Before unpowering they were running for about 6-7 years. Not much load on SSDs, or too important data. Just usual Linux updates, some logs in /var, etc. So maybe 30GB written during their entire life. I should power them up, and check out.
I do have also an old laptop with SSD, that I maybe power once a year, with pretty old drive, and it is still working perfectly.
A question I have not seen answered yet is, "how long do I need to power the drive on for to refresh the cell charges/data integrity?" Is it a case of just powering the drive on for a few seconds, a few days, or do the actual files need to be rewritten?
Or does permanent damage occur to the drive's data retention ability when left powered off?
What I've read is that it's advisable to either copy the data to a fresh drive when in doubt, or to run a full diagnostic on it so it's basically forced to address all the bits at least once. I that won't refresh the trapped charge I don't know what will.
ssd drivers doing it automatically via controller - manual copying is only for mechanical driers. @@Krawurxus
See you next year on this subject. 👍
All i have to say is thank you for your continued service sir.
Valuable experiment, thank you.
If you never turn on the SSD it becomes Quantum Storage.
Madlad. Thank you for your service!
I never really gave this a thought. But I just dug out an old laptop that has an SSD that has not been turned on for at least 3 years and it booted without issue.
Good to hear. It seems there's a lot of unfounded fear online about SSD long term storage. However, there is no substitute for a proper backup to keep your data safe.
@@htwingnut Absolutely. Data is the one thing that cannot be easily replaced. I image all of my machines regularly (at least the ones I use).
just recalled that I have a 512G ssd just sitting somewhere with some cold data. I would love to move them to HDD's but because of other reasons cant really afford more now haha.
I need to check if it's still having my data. It probably is not powered for just like 8 months now but eh
@@hariranormal5584 just try to full error check so the data is rewritten (recharged), not to often tho.
Subscribed and it's a very interesting topic you got here
This is a great video. I lost a usb for many years and noticed corruption. I always wondered. thank you
Man, awesome video, couldn't stop watching, and thoroughly explained. Good job! I know it's your own pocket money but I wonder if also testing some TLC and QLC would have surfaced something.
recently found an old 512mb usb stick, data is easily 13 years old and still fully survived.
Probably no need to continue the test year after year. The data storage will out live us leaving perfect data intact. That's the nature of molecular charged states. Metallic hard disks also will last for many years but already fading away just like the Model T Ford did.
They do tend to slow down with old stale data before they lose the data. ECC just kicks in more and more. I've seen that symptom countless times on high end name brand SSD's all the way to generic. The better drives of course will re-write a borderline sector if ECC worked a bit too hard. Moving the sector as a last resort. Point being is some drives might never lose any data if you read them each year. Too hard to call, too many controllers on the market. Good luck.
Interesting, I'll have to keep tabs on this; thanks.
The engineering in these things is amazing.
It'll take about 70 years minimum to lose data from non-use.
Yes, I heard that too! ... They tested an SSD which was unpowered since 1953, and the data was totally intact! 👍🤣
@@marcse7encitation needed please
@@marcse7enI agree with bloodyiron here I wanna see that.
as you note, TLC has an endurance of about 3k cycles, so your 128G SSDs should have a rating of about 385TB, and you took them to 280 or less. I don't know where the endurance rating of 60TB would come from - that sounds like QLC, actually.
thanks for doing this, even if it turns out not to be quite the worst-case you were aiming for...
Good point. I made an error. Newest JS600 SSD's seem to be QLC with 60TB TBW for the 128GB version: www.leven.com.tw/en/ssd/view/JS600-128GB
But original were labeled as TLC, and Leven confirmed 1000-3000 P/E cycles. Images for clarification: imgur.com/a/IkBmwf1
@@htwingnutback in November 2012 when I bought my LG Optimus l5 running android 4.0.3, I bought a silicon power (made in china) 32 gb micro SD card which was a class 4 speed card, pretty much common back in the days. I used it a lot and even though, it's now slow, it still works perfectly after eleven years.
Some people just love to put fake information on the internet like how SSD couldn't be trusted and how HDDs are great when it's the other way around
This is nice that someone is doing actual practical test for the science and for all of us.
IMHO, if a SSD survives in normal daily use for 10 years, that is great. I mean literally a normal use, that is very light use compared to daily PC gamers or who will produce multiple gigabytes of data per day.
If a SSD can't maintain data for 5-10 years just by sitting on shelf, that is serious problem. And HDD is way to go.
Very good interesting experiment… Thanks for taking the time and effort sharing the results. BR, Per (DK)
I have seen drives losing their data after just 3-4 years.... some friends didnt listen and just stored their photos on an SSD and when it was full just shelved it. Now they regret it but there is basically nothing you can do at that point - many of the images were corrupted (like serious double-digit percentage).
Also by reading the entire drive the controllers will check the voltage-level and depending on the manufacturer/model already start refreshing the data. Some years ago Samsung had the problem that their entrylevel SSDs had some serious performance and integrity degradation and the fix was that the controller would permanently monitor the sectors and re-write them if there were too many nearby reads and after some time-interval. Pretty sure since then most SSDs have implemented something similar as that was like 10 years ago already.
Still though, that is a very good point on why to not keep a backup on just one type of storage media and also why it may be best to avoid buying the cheapest SSDs. 1000 write cycles is not really a lot at all.
Early SSD were not exactly known for reliability, controller issues of big brands like Samsung were in IT news almost every day about ~13 years ago. The situation has improved a lot.
Yeah, you always need to have backups, electronics go bad sooner or later, some can last very very long and some very short.
Nice experiment. But wouldn't you test two years without power like this about three times?
After one year, you power the first set up, so they are basically reset. You check the same set again after (initial experiment start + 3 years), which is only two years after they last have been powered on.
And that is also the time frame for the second set.
Same goes if the three years would start after the first year, which makes four years.
could you elaborate please?
How do you actually factor in the reset of power levels during your tests?
Or are they not reset, because no data is written to them?
When you plug it in, it doesn't "reset" or "refresh" the cells. SSD's have to write at the page or block level. This would take a lot of time to "refresh" the cells, at least as much time as it takes to write to the entire SSD. The SSD does not know how log it's been unpowered. The only thing that would trigger it would be the wear leveling algorithm or garbage collection. But those usually require some form of file addition or deletion.
@@htwingnut Thank you for the answer it makes sense.
So basically your test is to check data integrity but if you take a brand new SSD, it should still work in 5 years even without power ? You would just lose your data ? The SSD would be still functional ? (if we assume actual material decay is negligible)
Thanks I hope you follow through with this. Great idea. Subscribed to follow.
very well done tests, very well presented video, thank you a lot :)
Awesome video!
I found an old ssd from 2017 and recently used it in an old parts build for my friend, still booted up windows and all the maleware perfectly intact.
ChatGPT:
For consumer-grade SSDs, you can generally expect data retention periods of 1 to 2 years at a minimum, with many exceeding 5 years if stored under typical conditions.
For enterprise-grade SSDs and high-quality, well-maintained SSDs, you can often expect data retention periods of 5 to 10 years or longer.
Thank you. I also asked ChatGPT and got a similar answer. However I also asked if it could site source references and it said this was from general consensus. Not to mention, those spans are for SSD's within TBW ratings not 3-4x the TBW rating.
Also, the Jedec standard indicates the opposite. Enterprise disks tend to be run harder and longer and hotter as well as stored in higher temps and indicate data retention less than a year.
That's dedication!!
This is such an important thing to do, but also so nerdy. I love it.
finding old usbs, cds, floppy discs, etc. is always something magical.
what will be on it? childhood games? family photos? a pack of install discs for windows ME and some proprietary software for a company long dead? porn?
of course, you run into some corrupted stuff. for me its always the fun things that are corrupted, usually old games. but for the most part these things (aside from things like casettes, vhs tapes, and 8 tracks especially) dont really age. they just sit in storage until you are brave enough to read them again.
I just found a crucial c300 64GB that I remember buying in 2009, I used it until 2016 when I installed windows 98 on it
. I just recently pressed it back to service in the retro pc using windows 98 and it retained all the data I had on it in storage between 2016-2023! Not any losses, boots up fine
Now this is interesting Content I didnt even know that the data of the Storages can get removed from not using them for years
I own SanDisk SSD from 2012 and it was only 240GB capacity.
It still works to this day with 95% health remaining in SSD info
And yes it's being used daily for over 11 years.
Simplest way to prolong SSD longevity, always make sure it never reach high temperature. I intentionally limiting the SSD speed to 20 MBps whenever copying or writing large data. Don't forget that 20 MBps is 160 Mbps because Byte vs Bit.
160 Mbps is still good enough to write 4K 60 fps video file in real-time
The minimum retention time is also once the drive has reached the specified endurance limit. A young drive will store data a lot longer.
I understand that the temperature at the time of data being written also has an impact on powered off data retention time, general idea being that low write temperature = bad, high write temperature = good, while storage temperature is opposite - low storage temperature = good, high storage temperature = bad.
Did you come across this in your research?
I came across this: An end of life device (i.e maxed out on writes) when stored at 10 C was good for about 75 years if written at 55 C. The JEDEC standard says that a "client" device written at 55 C and stored at 25 C should be good for 7.75 years, but if written at 25 C it is only guaranteed good for about one year. Who knew? Well Intel actually. They provided the data to JEDEC.
Gonna be interesting to see the result in a few years down the track
My question is: when left unpowered, no charges can be refreshed (obviously); but what happens on that initial power up, after the storage period? Does the controller set to actively refreshing all the stored charges? It might be interesting to see the power data (of course SSDs are quite power efficient, one would need precise equipment to measure that) of a drive that is in regular use at boot or wake from standby, compared with a drive that has been stored for a year or more.
Measuring power draw is a clever way to figure out whether it's doing refreshing at power. Store the drive at a high temperature (e.g. 50C) to accelerate data degradation and speed up testing.
Some SATA drives record NAND writes in addition to host writes (e.g. Samsung enterprise drives), so that would be an easier way to see refreshing it's doing.
Interesting video. Thanks again.
Super interesting! Thank you
this is incredible , thnak you
very cool. thank you for the hard work.
I had one sitting for about 8 years. I started using it recently, no issues and works perfect
I also have 16GB thumb drives from 2007, still work perfect also. Some I started to use recently as well. Nothing was lost
The Intel 2.5" enterprise/datacenter-class 256K SATA3 SSD that I used as my primary/boot drive in my 2015-2019 build sat in a box from 2019 to 2024. I recently put it into a 2.5" USB enclosure & all the data is still intact & it works fine. Also to note that approx. 4 years of use in my 2015 active daily-use gaming/home system only used approx. 1.5% of it's stated endurance rating (1700 TBW) for writes. These sorts of professional-grade, higher-end component SSD's are worth the extra money IMO just for the ultra-reliability peace-of-mind. Intel sold their SSD business to Solidigm some years back & those are the types enterprise-class SSD drives that I have also used in both my 2019 & current in-progress 2024 systems (both M.2 form factor & 2.5" SATA3 versions). Love them.
Great test. Thanks.
Hey, man, I appreciate the experiment and the video. Nice, dilligent, professional work you did there! No non-sense, too. 👍🏻
A quick side-question: What is the rack/external bay you're using there? It caught my eye instantly. Thanks!