this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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How do properly maintain an SSD not powered on frequently (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by tigersoul925@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum
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I know SSD's are not meant for data backup, but I do have an external SSD drive that I only plug and use occasionally. I know from research that the data should still be fine at least a year, so I should plug it in no less than that. But... apart from plugging it in, do I need to do anything or will the controller just magically refresh everything? In that case: how long does it need to be powered for this to be completed? Some say you need to actually read through all data, or even re-write it all, however that would be possible on a system drive.

What gives? It's really hard finding some solid advice googling the matter.

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[–] dr100@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Give it a full read, which you should anyway to check your backups?

[–] tigersoul925@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I should probably. An idea I had was to run a manual check of the latest time machine backup against the data partition. This is on a mac.

[–] dr100@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That would work. Actually if it's a constellation that supports TRIM (OS-Filesystem-whatever it sees on the USB - see this to get an idea how complex things can get) reading the saved backup might be equivalent to reading the whole SSD. Even if you used only 64 GBs of 1TB if the rest is TRIMed nothing (more) would be "really" read even if you do a full badblocks (or dd to /dev/null or any other full read test). Sure, it'll take a while to feed 900+ GBs of zeroes (or whatever the TRIMed sectors return) over USB but not much will be really read from the SSD.

[–] tigersoul925@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

That's really complex, so dd isn't really reading the whole thing regardless? Gosh!

[–] 5guys1sub@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sorry what is a full read? On MacOS specifically

[–] tigersoul925@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

There is no gui way of doing this afaik, I'd guess it involves doing some kind of dd > /dev/null