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.
Aaron DeVries
swope
~n