One key point about retention which is not often mentioned, and indeed neither does this article, is that retention is inversely proportional to program/erase cycles and decreases exponentially with increasing temperature. Hence why retention specs are usually X amount of time after Y cycles at Z temperature. Even a QLC SSD that has only been written to once, and kept in a freezer at -40, may hold data for several decades.
Manufacturers have been playing this game with DWPD/TBW numbers too --- by reducing the retention spec, they can advertise a drive as having a higher endurance with the exact same flash. But if you compare the numbers over the years, it's clear that NAND flash has gotten significantly worse; the only thing that has gone up, multiplicatively, is capacity, while endurance and rentention have both gone down by a few orders of magnitude.
For a long time, 10 years after 100K cycles was the gold standard of SLC flash.
Now we are down to several months after less than 1K cycles for QLC.
I also seem to remember reading retention is proportional to temperature at time of write. Ie, best case scenario = write data when drive is hot, and store in freezer. Would be happy if someone can confirm or deny this.
I know where talking theoretical optimums here, but: don't put your SSDs in the freezer. Water ingress because of condensation will kill your data much quicker than room temperature storage on NAND chips.
That's probably this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00262...
I definitely remember seeing exactly this.
Endurance going down is hardly a surprise given that the feature size has gone down too. The same goes for logic and DRAM memory.
I suspect that 2035 years time, hardware from 2010 will work, while that from 2020 will be less reliable.
Completely anecdotal, and mostly unrelated, but my NES from 1990 is still going strong. Two PS3’s that I have owned simply broke.
CRTs from 1994 and 2002 still going strong. LCD tvs from 2012 and 2022 just went kaput for no reason.
Old hardware rocks.
Specifically old Japanese hardware from the 80s and 90s - this stuff is bulletproof
For what it's worth my LCD monitor from 2010 is doing well. I think the power supplied died at one point but I already had a laptop supply to replace it with.
As far as I'm aware flash got a bit of a size boost when it went 3D and hasn't shrunk much since then. If you use the same number of bits per cell, I don't know if I would expect 2010 and 2020 or 2025 flash to vary much in endurance.
For logic and DRAM the biggest factors are how far they're being pushed with voltage and heat, which is a thing that trends back and forth over the years. So I could see that go either way.
> Even a QLC SSD that has only been written to once, and kept in a freezer at -40, may hold data for several decades.
So literally put your data in cold storage.