Comment by crote

8 hours ago

Perhaps their usual buyers just care less about retention?

Those drives aren't going to be used for cold storage, and it is basically a guarantee that there will be checksums and some form of redundancy. Who cares whether the data is retained for 10 or for 15 years after writing when you can do a low-priority background scrub of the entire drive once a month, and when there are already mechanisms in place to account for full-drive failure?

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crote

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delamon  8 hours ago

QLC retention reported to be around 1 year in unpowered state. I would assume, that drive does background refresh, though. No idea what effect it has on total drive lifetime. It is still mean that if you use it for cold storage it has to be powered.

  • wtallis  24 minutes ago

    A drive's write endurance rating is derived at least in part from the JEDEC standard data retention requirements: 1 year at 30C for consumer drives, 3 months at 40C for enterprise drives, IIRC. Thus, a drive that has reached the end of its rated write endurance can be expected to have those retention characteristics. A drive that hasn't been subjected to that much wear will have significantly longer retention.

  • cm2187  7 hours ago

    Why is it mean? Why would you want to use a technology that is unsuitable for cold storage for cold storage? You won't even get the power / IOPS benefit if all it does is an infrequent replication of data and is then switched off.