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Enterprise SSDs, Powered Off, Potentially Lose Data In a Week

Posted by timothy on from the other-side-of-solid-state's-speed dept.

New submitter Mal-2 writes with a selection from IB Times of special interest for anyone replacing hard disks with solid state drives: The standards body for the microelectronics industry has found that Solid State Drives (SSD) can start to lose their data and become corrupted if they are left without power for as little as a week. ... According to a recent presentation (PDF) by Seagate's Alvin Cox, who is also chairman of the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), the period of time that data will be retained on an SSD is halved for every 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperature in the area where the SSD is stored. If you have switched to SSD for either personal or business use, do you follow the recommendation here that spinning-disk media be used as backup as well?

6 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. I call BS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If the contents are lost in a week, we're probably talking about capacitor-backed SSDs that use some other technology than flash memory. Yes, it would be insane to use flash memory for archival purposes as well, but it still should easily retain its contents for at least a decade. When powered on, this problem does not exist as normally the controller slowly walks through the flash refreshing it.

    1. Re:I call BS by luther349 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      probably and no data center is going to not have power for a week and always have non flash based memory backups even if they did.

  2. Backup won't help you by cerberusss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    FTFS:

    If you have switched to SSD for either personal or business use, do you follow the recommendation here that spinning-disk media be used as backup as well?

    So how do backups help you? Except for ZFS and btrfs (?), no file systems check for data integrity. You're not going to detect the bitrot taking place, and you'll happily send that rotten data to your backup until the corruption is noticed in some other way.

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    8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
    1. Re:Backup won't help you by bws111 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The bit rot happens when the drives have been powered off for an extended period. The backups are taken before the power is removed.

  3. Re:I image my SSD regularly by Dunbal · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Haha! I'm old enough to remember when Seagate was the best.

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    Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
  4. Re:Thumb Drives by jarfil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Tape is some of a myth.

    The only safe media, is that which you keep copying before it deteriorates. Not HDDs, not SSDs, not CDs, not thumbdrives, and not tape. Any media you leave untouched past its data retention period, will lose data.

    What you need is to check every copy of your data for any sign of degradation, and replace it with a fresh copy as soon as, or before, it begins to fail. Tape may give you the most time between checks, but it doesn't change the fact that data you forget about is data you will lose.