Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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

I would be impossible to guess without a knowledge of internal working of a particular SSD. For a NAND-specific file system I've implemented (not SSD but a device using raw SLC NAND) there was a block refresh immediately after ECC error detection at read and also background process checking slowly all the pages in use (one week for a full cycle). Background scan was starting each time after powering on from a randomized point.

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

Make sense. I guess leaving it idle for some time should be part of the routine. Then again, there's a limit to how far one can go. If the routine ended up being "power up the drive and use it actively for 4 weeks at least" it would just become too much.

I wish there was just a simple feature to click and a progress bar showing that just did this without us having to try figuring things out.