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 A lot of physical processes are thermally activated. At higher temperatures the barrier between two (meta)stable states is often easier to cross, which is why things can go wrong at higher temperature.
If it is, as I read it, bits _written_ at higher temperature having a shorter lifetime even at lower temperature after, I can imagine that the state written at higher temp isn’t as far down into the local energy minimum.
Yes, I imagine that something like that is going on. And the manufacturer is honest about the 35C max operating temperature.
For the user, they write a bunch of data and immediately verify the data are good -- not looking closely at the temperature log. But hours/days later their files become corrupted.
It's something to be aware of, and a curious physics question.
Aaron DeVries
swope
Jos Dingjan