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.
@job
No, I think it's more like using hot glue on plastic. While it's hot the glue sticks to the plastic, but as it cools your whole crafting project falls apart.
(Just a metaphor, not the physics)
I think that's intuitive for storage, but the hot-at-write-time weakness may be a little different.
I'm imagining an array of cups and the drive controller is pouring water in them as the write operation. When the system is hot, the cups are jiggling and aiming the carafe is shaky. Not a lot of water gets in the intended cups, and some spills into the wrong cups. Enough goes in for the theshold of the immediate validity check, though.
Then even at normal temperature, slow evaporation over days means the amount of water in those cups drops below threshold in enough cups to break ECC margins -- corrupting the files.
I don't have a deep enough understanding of the physics to tell you if that analogy has much validity. But this is my hunch.
Aaron DeVries
swope
EveyPN
Job Snijders