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No, Your SSD Won't Quickly Lose Data While Powered Down

Posted by Soulskill on from the news-that-harder-to-freak-out-about dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A few weeks ago, we discussed reports that enterprise SSDs would lose data in a surprisingly short amount of time if left powered off. The reports were based on a presentation from Alvin Cox, a Seagate engineer, about enterprise storage practices. PCWorld spoke to him and another engineer for Seagate, and they say the whole thing was blown out of proportion. Alvin Cox said, "I wouldn't worry about (losing data). This all pertains to end of life. As a consumer, an SSD product or even a flash product is never going to get to the point where it's temperature-dependent on retaining the data." The intent of the original presentation was to set expectations for a worst case scenario — a data center writing huge amounts of data to old SSDs and then storing them long-term at unusual temperatures. It's not a very realistic situation for businesses with responsible IT departments, and almost impossible for personal drives.

3 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. The alarmist article was actually quite helpful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We have a long-term (over several years) exercise where we collect large amounts of data at a very hot waterside location overseas, in an air-conditioned office. And then the racks get moved to a non air-conditioned warehouse where they sit for a year or longer. And then we come back after a year or longer, move the racks back into office space, and do the next iteration.

    We were thinking about going to SSD, just for the drive performance, and we now know that our setup is a poster child for the problem that the alarmist article described.

    Of course, we copy off the valuable data and take it home, but coming back to random corruption on our system and middleware drives could introduce some real issues.

  2. Except when it suddenly dies by BLToday · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Lost another SSD over the weekend. Crucial m4 512GB. Lost detection of the drive by the computer (Win 7 desktop), plugged it in through a USB adaptor and it's still not detected (Windows and Mac). That's 3 in the last 18 months.

    RIP
    Muskin Chronos 120GB (Windows 7 laptop)
    Crucial m4 512GB (MacBook Pro 2012)
    Crucial m4 512GB (Windows 7 desktop)

    That being said I run everything on SSD: 2 HTPC, 2 desktops, 2 MacBooks, 2 Windows laptop.

    I can't find the common factor that causes the failures. It would just be working one day, then next day fail detection by the computer and it's all gone.

  3. Re:Just stick to the mantra by Grishnakh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Blu-Ray is total crap, as is all optical backup media.

    The biggest problem is that it's simply far too small to be useful. To back up a 1TB drive, you'll need 20 BD-R discs. That's a lot of swapping to do a full backup.

    Aside from that, they're slow, write-once, and suffer a lot from bit-rot due to poor quality media. DVD-Rs and CD-Rs had the same problems before, and those are completely useless for backup these days due to their puny size.

    The only thing that makes any sense at all for consumers is USB hard drives. They're fairly cheap, they're rewriteable, and only cost probably a few times what a single set of BD-R discs would cost. After a few backups, they've equaled in cost, plus it's a lot easier and faster to do incremental backups with them since you can just use rsync.

    Actually, the other poster's suggestion of using a NAS drive makes a lot of sense too.