They're still a horrible data archival solution, but mainly because of the high price per TB.
They're still a horrible data archival solution, but mainly because of the high price per TB.
I've heard conflicting reports on this.
Ultimately, any storage technology is about storing data. This can be done magnetically (aka: bits are tiny little magnets pointing in certain directions), as long as the magnets don't change, you can read back the data fine.
Or it can be done optically (ex: the dye inside of CD-roms, DVD or BluRay). As long as the dye remains a certain color, you can read it back fine.
Magnets lose charge over time, dyes can change color (especially if they're exposed to the sun). You won't notice over a year or even 2 years, but after 5, 10, or 15 years, things change enough that you start getting errors.
SSDs store data by punching an electrical charge into a transistor. The barrier is such that the electrical charge doesn't want to leak out: but... what is the rate of that leakage? All materials "leak" charge over time. And if the voltage changes dramatically, the change-in-voltage will change the data (and thus you'll lose data over time).
--------------------------------
Some SSDs, such as the Samsung 830, were well known for leaking charge and causing issues. Today, we use stacked 3D NAND, which is a different transistor type than the planar NAND on the Samsung 830, but that doesn't fundamentally answer the question of "What is the leakage current" and "how long do we have before enough voltage leaves the transistor to corrupt the data?"
I've seen conflicting reports, too—at least in the popular press and tech forums. Filtering down to reports with clear sourcing back to actual academic or industry research, the confusion pretty much goes away. This is an issue where the actual facts have been oversimplified and dumbed down and wrong interpretations have caught on and been repeated by people with no understanding of the underlying mechanisms for data loss and for forestalling the data loss.
In particular, there are tons of people on forums like /r/hardware who think that plugging in the SSD will prevent charge from leaking out of a floating gate memory cell or the charge trap memory cells now used by almost all SSDs. It won't. Using the SSD can lead to data being re-written before it has degraded unrecoverably, through several possible mechanisms. But aside from drives like the Samsung 840 and 840 EVO that were retrofitted with explicit data degradation checks as part of their firmware's operation, merely leaving the drive plugged in will not help directly, and the temperature effects compared to leaving it on a shelf will be a slight detriment to data retention.
It's helpful to recall that the JEDEC standards for SSD write endurance require consumer drives to provide 1 year of unpowered data retention for a drive that has reached the end of its write endurance. For brand-new flash, the leakage is orders of magnitude slower than for worn-out flash, so it's quite reasonable to expect data retention comparable to some of the storage mediums that actually make economic sense for archival.
How about a monthly full drive read? That's easy to set up.