Recent reports stating SSDs rapidly lose data when powered off are wrong and appear to be based on a misunderstanding. The original author of the presentation on which the news was based, has told PC World that his slides were misinterpreted. Also we reported about the potential loss of data. Alvin Cox, the Seagate engineer who wrote the presentation, told PC World, "people have misunderstood the data."
"I wouldn’t worry about [losing data]", Cox told PCWorld. "This all pertains to end of life. As a consumer, an SSD product or even a flash product is never going to get to the point where it’s temperature-dependent on retaining the data.
The 5 year old presentation was written for JEDEC, an industry organisation that writes memory specifications. The slides were intended to inform enterprise SSD users on what could happen when an SSD was stored without power, but only after it had the reached the end of its useful life span and when stored at abnormal temperatures. Situations in which a regular consumer SSD hardly ever gets.
When the presentation was linked in a forensic computing blog to explain why a SSD could start losing data, editors jumped on it and the news was quickly spread around the web. The International Business Time was the first to write about it and wrote that SSDs could become corrupted and lose data after only a week. After that, many other sites, including ours, jumped on the story which has now been debunked by the original author of the presentation.
The presentation was about a worst case scenario, something consumer users and even most enterprise users don't have to worry about, according to the Seagate engineer. Numerous tests have shown that it's hard to really wear out a SSD, some don't even wear after several Petabytes of data has been written to them. And even a worn out SSD still doesn't lose data, even when it's stored at 87F / 30C the entire time.
So, if you were worried about losing data from your SSDs, stop worrying.
Thanks for the tip Jon Tanguy!
