I love solid-state drives (SSDs). For a guy who travels a lot, having one in my laptop instead of a spinning hard drive is such a relief. Outside of fireworks and unattended bags, nothing stresses me out faster than lifting a laptop that's slightly off level and hearing its HDD platter scream as it grinds against its enclosure. External SSDs? Love those too. I own a number of these little fellas that I use for backing up my computer, shuttling photo projects around, and long-term storage of old files and media. After reading this piece from XDA, however, I'll be taking the ones I use for cold storage a little more often to make sure they've got enough juice to protect the data on them. It seems that an SSD going unpowered for a long time can pooch the data being stored on it:
Unlike hard drives that magnetize spinning discs to store data, SSDs modify the electrical charge in NAND flash cells to represent 0 and 1. NAND flash retains data in underlying transistors even when power is removed, similar to other forms of non-volatile memory. However, the duration for which your SSD can retain data without power is the key here. Even the cheapest SSDs, say those with QLC NAND, can safely store data for about a year of being completely unpowered. More expensive TLC NAND can retain data for up to 3 years, while MLC and SLC NAND are good for 5 years and 10 years of unpowered storage, respectively.
Non-volatile storage, my ass.
So, assuming that you're not buying professional-grade SSDs to use in a NAS setup, the best way to keep your data from withering away is to use your SSDs regularly. But if you do need to use one for long-term storage, you'll want to pull it out and plug it into a USB-C port, perhaps once every 10 months or so, to ensure it has the power it needs to keep sitting still.
