We all love our fast SSDs. Has our adoption of SSDs blinded us from the durability aspect of it?
A stored SSD, without power, can start to lose data in as little as a single week on the shelf.
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For client application SSDs, the powered-off retention period standard is one year while enterprise application SSDs have a powered-off retention period of three months.
To cover the durability loss of SSD cells, most SSDs ship with more capacity than they actually expose. The firmware is smart enough to use those spare cells once the live cells start to show their age.
Some SSD vendors devote more of the flash to overprovisioned spare area that’s inaccessible to the OS but can be used to replace blocks that have become unreliable and must be retired.
But this assumes SSDs are in use so the firmware can manage the block distribution.
Is the potential for data loss as mentioned by KoreBlog a real concern for SSD drives lying on the shelf?
In datacenter environments this won’t be much of an issue, but for home PC users that have a computer that hasn’t been turned on for a while?
For them, it just might be a disaster.