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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?

5 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. What it really says... by dshk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The relevant table is on 27. page.

    In short: if you use the SSD in a cold environment AND store it in hot environment than you may lose data quite quickly. Quicker than two weeks.

    Client drives are also affected, but the data loss occurs slighly later. I guess reason of the difference is that enerprise drives assume a higher work temperature.

    So the advice is that if you use the SSD in your air conditioned basement in a good case then do not store your SSD on the sun for extended periods.

    And no, I do not use spinning media as a backup. I use tapes. Using spinning media for proper backups is almost impossible. See http://www.taobackup.com/

    1. Re:What it really says... by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Interesting, because that could affect quite a few businesses in Florida.

      1. Business switches to SSDs. Uses them in a 75 degree air conditioned environment.
      2. Hurricane.
      3. Business unable to get power for a week. Computers down. No power to SSDs. No power for air conditioning. Temperature in office rises to over 100 degrees during the day.

      That's a very likely scenario, especially for smaller businesses (but not small) that wouldn't be organized enough to have back-up power or work from home capabilities.

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  2. Re:How powered off is "powered off"? by jellomizer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When ever something is "Enterprise" class it means it is vastly inferior to other solutions on the market but cost 3x as much.
    For some reason this isn't a buzzword that sends shivers down every IT workers spine yet.

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  3. Re:How powered off is "powered off"? by dshk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You may be right in case of other equipment, but enterprise grade drives are really better. For example I do not know any consumer SSD which has power loss capacitors (Intel 320 is not produced anymore). Most consumer drives don't contain even those capacitors which would be necessary to prevent the loss of - not the freshly written but the - old(!) data in case of a power loss. Consumer HDDs lied (or lying?) about sync, they confirm sync before they actually save the data to disk. And I am sure that consumer SSDs do something similar, because consumer SSD are usually faster (although their speed frequently fluctuates to extreme extents) than their corresponding enterprise variants, which is impossible in a safe way without power loss protection capacitors.

  4. Charge trap vs floating gate NAND... by AcquaCow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Newer 3D NAND is using a charge trap design which basically solves the electron leakage issue found with the older floating gate NAND...

    Also, the move to the newer 3D NAND brings us back up to 40nm processes vs the 10nm gates we are currently working with, allowing for much better reliability.

    Disclaimer: I've been selling enterprise flash storage for the last 6 years.

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