Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Flash memory is a poor choice for offline or long-term storage as the integrity of the data degrades overtime. This technology is not intended to hold data for the span of time you're seeking.
Normally when these fail they switch into read only mode to give you time to copy your stuff but that isn't guaranteed. And the data may be seriously corrupted by the time that occurs.
I'd suggest considering worm mediums such as archival DVDs and keeping multiple copies of anything precious.
That being said, I've been happy with my Samsung cards. They will potentially survive longer in an active machine.
The read-only fail-safe mode only prevents additional write operations from further wearing out the NAND cells, as reading does not cause nearly as much damage as writing does. This is to allow any data to be read off the drive before it is discarded.
As such, SSD lifetime is usually measured in how much can be written to it before it fails. The data should not start to become significantly corrupt before the drive cuts you off.
But this won't save OP. Unplugged, the electric charges that represent the data inside the SSD, will fade. Unpowered, the data on an SSD will begin to simply "leak away" within 3-5 years, as the NAND cells lose their charges representing the binary data.
If this is allowed to happen, the drive will be fine the next time you go to plug it in, but the data will simply be gone.