Comment on If I wanted to bury a hard drive for archival purposes (e.g. Country becoming Dictatorship), how to keep the contents from being damaged and where is the safest place to bury it?

• Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  SSD would be 100% dead unless you buried it with a power source.

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  • NostraDavid@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    SSD would be 100% dead unless you buried it with a power source.

    Huh? Why? Should SSDs not be able to contain data without power?

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    • rikudou@lemmings.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s one of the downsides of SSDs, you lose data really fast without power. Like, after a year, your data will almost sure not be intact.

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    • Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Flash memory stores data as a voltage level, with different values being a tiny distance apart. The voltage slowly leaks out of the cells and has to be periodically topped off.

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    • Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No, they’ll start to corrupt within a year or two. They need to be powered to retain data.

      After 30 years you can forget it.

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    • Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Sadly, no.

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    • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There was a recent paper on this. The failure rate was higher than expected. You’ll have to search for it; I didn’t save a link.

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      • The_v@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Leave a USB drive in a drawer for a couple of years and you can prove this one at home.

        That’s why my backup drive is an old spinny hard drive.

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