I just concluded a decade long experiment. I had a USB flash drive in a jar buried in my back yard since 2015. I dug it up, plugged it in and it suffered no data loss after 11 years idle underground.
It's a usless experiment but everyone needs hobbies.
@Aaron_DeVries
While doing environmental testing on a helicopter payload, I learned that NVMe drives (and perhaps all SSDs) can write data at high ambient temperatures >40 C, but the data is less permanent than if you write data at normal ambient temperatures.
So on hot days we had to hurry and copy our 4TB drives after the flight because the data had a half-life of a dozen hours or so.
That phenomenon is already documented, but I don't think it's widely known.
@swope @Aaron_DeVries it’s inherent to all SSDs, to varying degrees, because it increases leakage from the cells — from memory offline storage at temperature is actually worse than online behaviour.
you can certainly design SSDs to be better at high temperature, mostly by doing the normal things to decrease leakage, like single layer cells, decreasing density of the cells, increasing the number of error correction bits, etc. you can also just mitigate the online case in firmware, by increasing cell refresh frequency.
such SSDs are manufactured, primarily for industrial, aviation, automobile, and similar applications, and especially targeting such markets you’ll often find data sheets giving a lot more detail about retention at temperature.
Aaron DeVries
swope
Sam Sneddon 🏳️⚧️