Comment by mrguyorama

Indeed. The paper everyone gets the "flash loses its data in a few years" claim from wasn't dealing with consumer flash and consumer use patterns. Remember that having the drive powered up wouldn't stop that kind of degradation without explicitly reading and re-writing the data. Surely you have a file on an SSD somewhere that hasn't been re-written in several years, go check yourself whether it's still good.

Even the utter trash that is thumb drives and SD cards seem to hold data just fine for many years in actual use.

IIRC, the paper was explicitly about heavily used and abused storage.