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Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

Are we anywhere close to that? I just picked up a 14TB HDD for under $300.

I am also unclear on how much of a concern leakage is on a SSD. If I leave it disconnected on a shelf for a year, will it have lost data? I have seen some reports that SSDs need to be refreshed regularly, which makes then ill suited for cold storage (eg leave an offsite backup at parents).

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"Power-off data retention is increased from 1 month to 3 months."

I don't think these are meant for ordinary users. One extended vacation and your data is toast...

I’ve been buying $170 renewed 18TB Exos drives and they are amazing. No failures among the 24 I have so far for almost two years

Where do you get them? Any kind of owner confirmation or just roll the dice? I feel a bit queasy buying used drives, imagining it has been redlined, while living in 95C temps for three years before I come along. That being said, I suppose the market of people buying such drives new probably implies they were treated appropriately.

I get them from Ebay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/125735863196

They supposedly come with a 2 year warranty but like the GP I haven't had any break (out of six) so I haven't tried using it.

Modern high density HDDs don't have a great cold shelf life either. Depending on the HDD or SSD you can see claims of 5-25 years of cold storage retention. Have to test and actually see if it holds though :)

5+ years is already approaching my comfort limit on drives anyway, so that’s not really a problem. I just want to know that I can stick a drive on a shelf for two years without undue stress. Something which is not currently advertised for SSDs.

I take an annual backup and ship it offsite. Current wisdom says that the SSD is more perilous to recover than the HDD if I need to restore it within the next year or two.

Dunno know I've ever heard conventional wisdom that said NAND flash was particularly short lived on the shelf vs other options. E.g. never heard of mass deaths of files on USB drives from sitting in drawer for a year or two, usually just typical endurance/usage deaths from cheap flash.

Hell, I just took my very first SSD (60 GB OCZ Vertex 2) and booted the old install fine after it had sat on a shelf for ~7 years. Of course that just had the Windows boot files on NTFS so I can't say for sure no bitrot had occurred. In the same bin/nostalgia period I had an old 2 GB USB 2.0 flash drive with Ubuntu 9.10 on it that did validate the fs image fine from the same bin as well.

I remember https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igJK5YDb73w this guy was doing some intentional tests with modern cheapo drives but it hasn't even reached time for the year 2 check quite yet.

PDF[0], but this industry presentation said that for a consumer drive kept at 25C, one should expect 58 weeks of unpowered data storage (page 27). Significantly worse for higher temps. I appreciate those are probably bare minimum threshold numbers which have probably changed, but that makes me uncomfortable vs a HDD where I have not heard such a qualifier. Just given the cost per TB, I will continue to use HDDs for offline backups.

[0] https://www.jedec.org/sites/default/files/Alvin_Cox%20%5bCom...

Since at least 2010 there are flash standards which define a floor and no such standard at all for HDD? Choose what you want of course but I'll take a 15 year old minimal standards guarantee over no standards guarantee at all.

This has always been a risk of mechanical drives as well. Sitting mechanical drives tend to seize up.

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