Offline SSDs and USB sticks... data retention?

[the86d]

What is the longest you have let a USB stick or SSD sit idle (unplugged from power) for, and was the data still in tact?

In understand flash can only hold a charge for "up to" 10 years, so I am curious as to people's experience with longevity.

Also: Is New tech for SSD not "flash" memory?

[Robotron2k84]

I think you misunderstand how eeprom and flash works. No charge is held in a volatile way, like SRAM. The state of the junction is changed, with electrons tunneled into what is akin to a pressure vessel...i.e. they are trapped. External factors can influence the state of the junction and impurities can lead to lower thresholds of state change.

Stray background ionizing radiation and quantum tunneling are the primary influences in flipping bits in idle solid-state media.

It's also why Magneto-Optical and pressed CDs/DVDs have the highest longevity...that the physical representation of the bits are fixed, by temporary or permanent polymerization of the media. The lower the threshold to state change, the higher the incidence of radiation, quantum-induced or environmental corruption.

[high_revs]

I think you misunderstand how eeprom and flash works. No charge is held in a volatile way, like SRAM. The state of the junction is changed, with electrons tunneled into what is akin to a pressure vessel...i.e. they are trapped. External factors can influence the state of the junction and impurities can lead to lower thresholds of state change.

Stray background ionizing radiation and quantum tunneling are the primary influences in flipping bits in idle solid-state media.

It's also why Magneto-Optical and pressed CDs/DVDs have the highest longevity...that the physical representation of the bits are fixed, by temporary or permanent polymerization of the media. The lower the threshold to state change, the higher the incidence of radiation, quantum-induced or environmental corruption.

I've left a stick on and a microssd all the time in my laptop. No issues. Just pass five yrs as the desktop became a desktop. Meaning no need to move around house

Robotron
The only issues I had with cds is that newer CD players seem to have issues reading. Not sure if I need to install a program or something. Have tried in different pcs. I forgot to keep the 4x rewritable just for reading those old cds and threw it with e- re cycle.

[Robotron2k84]

Pressed CDs that follow the Red/Blue book standards are readable in any drive. Ones following LFN/Hybrid/HSFS/UDF/etc. may not be.

Pressed CDs are not recordable. Recordable discs are not long-lasting, and also may necessitate having the same era CD drive to read packet-based recorded media due to how it may have been inscribed.

Some pressing houses will do small runs of 250-300 discs at $0.75-0.95 apiece. If your data is truly worth something to you, the price is pretty small to run a batch of archival CDs, plus you have duplicates.

M-Disk is a hybrid of these technologies, but has been a commercial failure as far as I know.