Solid-state drives lose data if left without power for just a few days

So, to summarize: Claims made, no substantiation offered. Not even any anecdotal support.
Conclusion: fish story.

Computer0304 said:

I think the title of the article is pretty misleading as the article says this mostly applies to enterprise grade SSDs and the article itself doesn't say anything about lasting only a few days.

I agree completely. The way the article is set up it makes you immediately think they are discussing SSD's in home computers and laptops. Then a sentence before the lat few paragraphs states enterprise drives are most vulnerable.

I personally have an old Intel 520 SSD which has a fatal flaw that can essentially lock you out and destroy your data forever if it loses power a certain way. I use it as a "repair drive" when a friend or relative needs help restoring files or has a pesky virus that needs removing, etc via a USB to SATA cable (kind of like a large USB Rescue Disk but faster) and it sits without use sometimes for 4 or 5 months. Even then it has retained all of the files on it without any issue.

It's a shame that ZD has gotten so bad. A decade ago you could actually read educational tech articles. Now they have to resort to alarmist headlines and can't even cite a single manufacturers drive that suffers from this horrendous 9 degree fatal flaw?

I decided to read the blog post the article cites: https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015...storage-issues

I found the part that the story should have actually written in which...For example, if a client application SSD is stored at 25 degrees C (77 degrees F) it should last about 2 years on the shelf under optimal conditions. If that temperature goes up 5 degrees C, the storage standard drops to 1 year.

The standards change dramatically when you consider JEDEC's standards for enterprise class drives. The storage standard for this class of drive at the same operating temperature as the consumer class drive drops from 2 years under optimal conditions to 20 weeks. Five degrees of temperature rise in the storage environment drops the data retention period to 10 weeks. Overall, JEDEC lists a 3-month period of data retention as the standard for enterprise class drives.

A check of various drive manufacturers, in this case Samsung, Intel, and Seagate, shows that their ratings for data retention of their consumer class drives are what would be expected for JEDEC's enterprise class drive standards. All three quote a nominal 3-month retention time period. Most likely, the manufacturers are being conservative; however, it demonstrates the potential variability the manufacturers associate with data retention on any SSD in storage."

" It looks like a misunderstanding of this 5-year-old PowerPoint page set the Internet ablaze
The original presentation dates back to when Cox chaired a committee for JEDEC, the industry group that blesses memory specs. It was intended to help data center and enterprise customers understand what could happen to an SSD—but only after it had reached the end of its useful life span and was then stored at abnormal temperatures. It’s not intended to be applied to an SSD in the prime of its life in either an enterprise or a consumer setting.
But that’s not how the Internet viewed it. The presentation—almost five years old now—surfaced in a forensic computing blog as an explanation for why an SSD could start to lose data in a short amount of time at high temperatures. Once media outlets jumped on the story, it spread across the globe. "

The above quoted from a source provided by A GUY in post 19. Sort of gives a whole different meaning to the story. I don't think that too many of us have to worry about SSD's used in DATA CENTERS
Art.