Comment by lizknope
4 days ago
I've been hearing about this for years and it makes sense theoretically but has anyone ever actually seen it? What are the errors reported? Or does the drive return bad data but reports no error?
There was a guy on reddit that took about 20 cheap USB flash drives and checked 1 every 6 months. I think after 3 years nothing was bad yet.
I've copied OS ISO images to USB flash drives and I know they sat for at least 2 years unused. Then I used it to install the OS and it worked perfectly fine with no errors reported.
I still have 3 copies of all data and 1 of those copies is offsite but this scare about SSDs losing data is something that I've never actually seen.
Of course. Cheap USB sticks in particular "spoil" pretty frequently due to firmware corruption while being stored in a drawer, this is something they're known for since the invention. I had this happen with a few. For some designs, it's possible to reflash them and they'll work again.