This is the first time I am hearing of the statements

First time I heard about this it was said about flashdrives and memory cards. I have some of those that are still readable after over a decade in the drawer. I wouldn't be concerned about SSDs.

It is true that JEDEC specs only require 1 year offline retention on a consumer SSD at 30 C. Here is a document from Seagate about it: https://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/doc … ch-paper-us.pdf

I feel like we would hear more about lost data if SSDs only met the bare minimum though.

Remember that much of our 1980s vintage equipment had a five year design lifespan.

ncmark wrote on 2025-03-19, 16:16:

Yet I have also read that plugging them in does not refresh the charges.

Some SSD controllers are known to:
A) Perform garbage collection in the background
B) Rewrite pages when there are too many read errors for it
C) Rewrite pages when there are too many reads since the last write (like many other types of memory, reading data repeatedly from flash will cause it to degrade)

So plugging them in does "refresh" things somehow, or at least the mere act of accessing the data on it does.

I agree all of this may be excessive paranoia.

I've just gone through about 100-200 SSD's at work, some of these will have been sitting in a cardboard box unpowered and unloved for 3+ years.

My testing was very basic, use diskpart to delete any partitions, create 1 single partition and run scandisk + surface scan.
Majority of disks tested ok.

If I didn't delete the partitions the PC would quite happily boot from the copy of windows installed on the SSD.
A few months seems very short period of time, I'd think your good for a few years.

chinny22 wrote on 2025-03-20, 03:29:

I've just gone through about 100-200 SSD's at work, some of these will have been sitting in a cardboard box unpowered and unlove […]
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I've just gone through about 100-200 SSD's at work, some of these will have been sitting in a cardboard box unpowered and unloved for 3+ years.

My testing was very basic, use diskpart to delete any partitions, create 1 single partition and run scandisk + surface scan.
Majority of disks tested ok.

If I didn't delete the partitions the PC would quite happily boot from the copy of windows installed on the SSD.
A few months seems very short period of time, I'd think your good for a few years.

Yup, fairly modern SSDs will hold data for far longer than the "Industry" experts want you to believe . .I mean its in their best interests to have you replace these drives rather than keep using them.

I still have a few 32Gb SSDs from 10 years ago that will happily boot even after not being used that long.

IIRC good quality SLC/TLC drives have a ~100 year storage life which doesn't seem unreasonable, lower quality nand will fare less well I suspect but should still have a data retention life longer than spinning rust. People think spinning rust will last forever but it doesnt and usually lasts a couple of decades in storage before the mechanicals fail or rubber/silicone parts fail, I guess you could save the data if the platters dont get damaged. This is assuming normal storage, if its controlled storage then the drive should last even longer, but parts will still perish even in controlled storage.

If I think about it I wonder if we will even be able to eaisly access and read these Sata/NVME SSDs in the future, its damn hard trying to access HDDs that are a few decades old unless you have period correct hardware .. try throwing a MFM HDD onto a modern system. Itll be even harder once Sata is fully deprecated and removed and NVME will eventually head that way too I guess, being a Retro buff only drives home just how silly it is to worry about data retention life, in several decades I may not even be able to use or access these drives without working period correct hardware.

Well, thanks for the coments

I just ordered a sansung t7 shield (4th one) so this seems to be the way I am going