Comment by userbinator
2 years ago
There are millions of ten year old QLC SSDs
In 2014 QLC was nothing but a research curiosity. The first QLC SSD was introduced in 2018:
https://www.top500.org/news/intel-micron-ship-first-qlc-flas...
You have to also remember that people buy storage expecting it to last. I have decades-old magnetic media which is tiny but still readable.
QLC has shipped in flash storage devices since 2009:
https://www.slashgear.com/sandisk-ships-worlds-first-memory-...
But that it doesn't really matter what people were using 10 years ago is the point. Devices from that era are of negligible value even if they're perfectly operational because they're tiny and slow.
The point you raise is a different one -- maybe you have an old device and you don't want to use it, you just want to extract the data that's on it. Then if the bits can no longer be read, that's bad. But it's also providing zero competition for new devices, because the new device doesn't come with your old data on it. The manufacturer has no reason to purposely want you to lose your data, and a very good reason not to -- it will make you hate them.