When I retire a computer, I often put the hard drive in an anti-static bag and file it as a "snapshot in time" type of backup.

I've got PATA drives here that I can put in a caddy and retrieve data from.

My question then is, does anyone have the knowledge to predict how long a Solid State Drive will retain data in an unpowered state?

I've never even had an SSD fail, powered or unpowered, but I didn't buy any SSDs for the first two or three years. I waited until the tech matured a bit.

I did find this, which was closed - but has some info.

https://superuser.com/questions/4686...ile-not-in-use

I did read a couple of other pages and I guess there's no real clear answer - that I could find by searching for a while. I would suspect that it'll depend on the age of the drive when you turned the power off, when it was created, and maybe even the conditions under which you store it.

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Basically a memory cell has a charge and unpowered over time will disappear. How long depends on many factors. You can not put it a drawer and forget about it...

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Yes, I was pretty sure that was the only sort of answer available for long term. How about shorter periods of time though?

I've had people say to me they are being relocated for 6 months or a year, they are taking their laptop etc. but not their tower/desktop.

With an ordinary hard disk machine I know the answer. It'll be fine other than possibly changing a BIOS battery on an old machine. But just where does an SSD's luck run out.

The only way I can think to get any idea is to load up 10 with data/operating system and resurrect one every year. But any figure from such a small sample would be suspect.

I hadn't found any published figures but surely someone must have done some research to give some sort of basic "rules of thumb".

About the only published figures I have found are 10 years under normal conditions. But that is with a fairly new drive. Over time "wear and tear" will degrade performance including data retention.

https://www.jedec.org/sites/default/...0Mode%5d_0.pdf

For anyone who collects isolated pieces of information (like me) here is some first hand. It came about while I was working with the SSD that prompted my original post in this thread.

I was originally asked to bring a laptop back into use that wouldn't boot. I replaced the SSD with an HDD because I couldn't make any sense of the SSD with Parted Magic.

Laptop is now fine.

Laptop was acquired in 2010/11 which equates with the date of a review of the SSD which said it had been discontinued 2011.

The laptop and SSD had been upgraded to Windows 10 so it was in use 2015. Sometime after that it was put in a cupboard and forgotten about.

GParted tells me there are three partitions on the disk.

One labelled "System Reserved" I can access and write and read to.

Of the other two, the most comprehensible error message is "File or directory is corrupted or unreadable. GParted knows partitions are there and their format type and size. The main partition shows zero use the other half use.

I'm not sure I would trust an SSD this age in any case, but I may just try writing a new partition table to it, creating a single partition and formatting.

Experience from this one though hints that you certainly don't leave an SSD unpowered for 4/5 years.

And just to finish this off, I did write a new partition table to the disk with success, but actually creating a partition within the claimed space failed with unspecified errors.

It's the way that it is.

But do be aware that some modern laptops are being supplied with SSD's mounted permanently on the motherboard.

On-board shouldn't be a problem - just drag out your old laptops and plug'em in every so often; no need to even fire them up.

Been watching this thread, so decided to go find an old m.2 that I had to rescue from an ASUS Zenbook. It was a "special" low-profile I had to get a special adaptor/cable from China. Got the data off, been in the cupboard for years.
Coughed and spluttered a couple of times, but eventually came up ok. Windows and 2 versions of Mint mate - 14 and 17 along with swap and /home. fsck ran automagically and I was able to run through the photos without incident.

So we still don't know how long they will last, but it's gotta be a reasonable while.

No, I agree that there should be no more problem with an onboard drive than with the traditional 2.5" type of SSD that you can plug in. Just suggesting that if one of those soldered on drives does fail, it's not going to leave much in the way of repair options.

I suppose that in the last 4/5 years that's the second SSD I've come across as failed. When you consider how many traditional Hard Drives I've come across as failed since the first one I put in an Amstrad 1512 back in 1986 that's a fairly high failure rate.

Give that both of the failed SSD's have taken all of their data with them, data recovery software not making any sense of them either, I'd like to take the liberty of quoting part of your signature before putting this to bed:

I always presume you have a verified B-A-C-K-U-P.........

I have had several USB flash drives fail over the years. Some in a read only state and some not. The only built in SSD fail was my Asus Eee 900 with a whopping 4GB. Wear leveling was not as advanced as today's drives but it lasted about 7 years.

Granted I've had only a few hard drives fail in operation and some were self inflicted. Studies done have shown that 20% of HDDs fail on average in about 4-5 years.