SSD power rack

[Rillez]

Been looking around but can´t seem to find the answer, so - do you only need to keep power to the SSD or you have to "click" the files so it dosen´t loose all data.

If the answer is "yes you only need to power it" then -

Is there anything on the market for longterm storage of SSDs?

Thinking about a rack that you can plug your ssds and power them.

 

(Lets say I have 80 ssds so moving them 1 by 1 is gonna be a pain)

[SimplyGone]

it shouldn't lose any data powered or not.  it's a non-volatile storage medium.  It's not like RAM where it'll lose all bits of data once the power is switched off.  Who told you you need to keep an SSD live for it to keep it's data?

 

@Mel0n. What's the make of your 5.25 drive to many 2.5 inch drives rack mount?  That might help this chap out if I'm wrong in my previous statement

[RollinLower]

to be honest i wouldn't worry about dataloss if you're not planning on storing the drives without power for over a couple years.

 

this is a good read on the topic:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/427435/death-and-the-unplugged-ssd-how-much-you-really-need-to-worry-about-ssd-reliability.html

[Rillez]

20 minutes ago, SimplyChunk said:

it shouldn't lose any data powered or not.  it's a non-volatile storage medium.  It's not like RAM where it'll lose all bits of data once the power is switched off.  Who told you you need to keep an SSD live for it to keep it's data?

 

@Mel0n. What's the make of your 5.25 drive to many 2.5 inch drives rack mount?  That might help this chap out if I'm wrong in my previous statement

Lots of website says for longterm storage you start to loose data after 6-12 months, And I was thinking if you have a powerrack you can extend the lifetime of the data on the SSD

22 minutes ago, RollinLower said:

to be honest i wouldn't worry about dataloss if you're not planning on storing the drives without power for over a couple years.

 

this is a good read on the topic:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/427435/death-and-the-unplugged-ssd-how-much-you-really-need-to-worry-about-ssd-reliability.html

Thanks for the link!

[manikyath]

what are you planning to do with this?

 

if it's for archival storage, BD-R still beats SSD's by quite a lot, especially if you buy big spindles.

 

if you're rotating out 80 SSD's as a form of project storage.. fill a computer with as many 16-port sata controllers as you can fit, and make a NAS. loose disks as project storage is a hilareously poor idea.

[danalog]

1 hour ago, SimplyChunk said:

it shouldn't lose any data powered or not.  it's a non-volatile storage medium.  It's not like RAM where it'll lose all bits of data once the power is switched off.  Who told you you need to keep an SSD live for it to keep it's data?

 

@Mel0n. What's the make of your 5.25 drive to many 2.5 inch drives rack mount?  That might help this chap out if I'm wrong in my previous statement

SSDs do indeed start to lose data when unpowered. They're a terrible solution for long term storage, and bad value since you don't need something that expensive for data that basically never is accessed.

There are a few ways you could go about this, IcyDock sells docks that allow you to mount up to 6 "laptop size" hard drives in one 5.25 bay and up to 12 in two of them. Or, you could use the solution I do, a StarTech SAS dock with four 15mm 15,000RPM server drives in one 5.25 bay. These small drives come in up to 5TB, so you could get 20TB in one 5.25.

Honestly though, for archival I would recommend a proper solution such as BD-R. The most reliable/cost effective.

[jaslion]

1 hour ago, Rillez said:

Lots of website says for longterm storage you start to loose data after 6-12 months, And I was thinking if you have a powerrack you can extend the lifetime of the data on the SSD

Is this actual archival storage that basically wont ever be touched or a old projects on a drive to be accessed sometimes kinda deal?

 

If the latter just build a big nas with anti bitrot protection.

 

If the first blurays or hell even tapes are FAR better and can have a lifespan of 10-30 years before it becomes an issue.

 

Ssds and hdds become an issue after a year usually. They dont just need to be spun up they need to be actively checked for bitrot.

 

I have seen SO MANY people, companies,... lose old but importanr achieval data by just dumping it on a drive and putting it on a shelf. It literally rots away doing that.

 

On a bluray,dvd,tape,... it doesnt rot. What does break down is the material itself so make sure to get proper archieval stuff known for longevity.

[manikyath]

12 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

SSDs do indeed start to lose data when unpowered. They're a terrible solution for long term storage, and bad value since you don't need something that expensive for data that basically never is accessed.

There are a few ways you could go about this, IcyDock sells docks that allow you to mount up to 6 "laptop size" hard drives in one 5.25 bay and up to 12 in two of them. Or, you could use the solution I do, a StarTech SAS dock with four 15mm 15,000RPM server drives in one 5.25 bay. These small drives come in up to 5TB, so you could get 20TB in one 5.25.

Honestly though, for archival I would recommend a proper solution such as BD-R. The most reliable/cost effective.

icydock also have an 8-bay in one 5.25", 16-bay in two, and as of recently, 24-bay in 3x 5.25".

 

but if cost per GB is of concern.. dont buy hotswap bays, and certainly dont buy the nice icydock ones.

Just now, jaslion said:

On a bluray,dvd,tape,... it doesnt rot. What does break down is the material itself so make sure to get proper archieval stuff known for longevity.

technically, tape does rot, but still LTO is rated for 15-30 years so that's mostly a moot point. just stick your tapes in a big metal and concrete safe.

as for material degradation on disks - this is something that was mostly 'fixed' in the transition from CD to DVD, on a CD the data layer is technically exposed (it's right behind the label), but on DVD it's in the middle of the disk, and on BD it's close to the underside, with a hardened layer below it. i'm not gonna say you should store blurays in a dank basement, but when storing in "room temperature conditions" i'd expect the physical disks to outlast your need for the data.

 

other than that - very yes, much agree.

[jaslion]

11 minutes ago, manikyath said:

just stick your tapes in a big metal and concrete safe.

Airtight too with some silica gel packs.

 

Costs basically the same and adds even more longevity.

 

Also watch out for uv. Uv is the true killer of all storage media

[Rillez]

There is lots of TB with video that might be accessed in the following years, so blueray sounds like a pain so maybe some sort of tape solution rather then letting the SSDs fade and hope for the best.

 

Thanks for all of you help, will take this information and try to figure out a solution. If you have anything alike at home then I would love to hear about it!

 

Cheers

/Rillz

[Kilrah]

Besides tape with proper storage procedures hard drives are basically the second best solution - obviously you want multiple copies of any medium you end up using and HDDs often come out cheaper.

[Blue4130]

11 hours ago, Rillez said:

There is lots of TB with video that might be accessed in the following years, so blueray sounds like a pain so maybe some sort of tape solution rather then letting the SSDs fade and hope for the best.

 

Thanks for all of you help, will take this information and try to figure out a solution. If you have anything alike at home then I would love to hear about it!

 

Cheers

/Rillz

Tape IS still king, but it is really not viable for most home users. Tape drives are still very much enterprise territory and start at about $3000 USD for a basic single drive unit. That's a hard cost for most home users to justify.

[NewMaxx]

On 1/19/2023 at 6:46 AM, Rillez said:

Been looking around but can´t seem to find the answer, so - do you only need to keep power to the SSD or you have to "click" the files so it dosen´t loose all data.

If the answer is "yes you only need to power it" then -

Is there anything on the market for longterm storage of SSDs?

Thinking about a rack that you can plug your ssds and power them.

 

(Lets say I have 80 ssds so moving them 1 by 1 is gonna be a pain)

I've covered this extensively on Reddit even in recent months as it's a common question. I'll try to be brief here.

 

Yes, data retention is limited on SSDs used for cold storage. The length of time is dependent on a number of factors. If you have a fresh or near-fresh SSD with modern TLC and were doing something like sequential writes (backup/archive), it will last far longer than the JEDEC 1-year. It will be more like a decade. Data loss is unfortunately not unidirectional so you can't just pump the charge back up, however there are algorithms that know how thresholds are changed for specific pages/blocks/block groups to restore intended values (rewrite) as long as errors do not exceed what LDPC + RAID can reproduce (RBER).

 

Second, it's not just power-on. The controller tracks time stamps so it knows when to check older flash which often means it has to poll the host or retimer. There are specific pieces of hardware that can you can use act like a host to initialize this process (retention card) but I am not aware of them still being sold. However, if you want to be sure you want to do a full drive of reads or a re-image (full rewrite). This actually caused people to discover the V6/128L Samsung TLC flash issue (full reads led to the flash erroring and being retired). The drive itself otherwise can rapidly check flash for errors because it can sample from groups of blocks based on their characteristics (varies in manufacture, position in the stack, etc).

[kokosnh]

It's actually a continuous process even if SSD is plugged  
The NAND memory cells, are leaking electrons all over, but it's slow, and heavy depended on the temperature.
Some SSD have a refresh mechanism (rewriting old data to different NAND cells), that's why it's said to leave it plugged.
Most famous example is the first commercial SSD to use TLC, samsung 840 and 840 evo, that had that added in firmware update, as they had problems reading 1 month old data

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention

Well, but not all SSD have it. And I don't even know if anybody is looking at it, as I didn't find any examples of it, in controller specifications, and reviews.
Today they are heavily dependent on multilayer error correction, and soft voltage read.

 

so the answer is, it can help, but just leaving it plugged, may not do the trick. As Newmaxx mention, the controller has to check the old data and rewrite it to new nand cells. I never read anything specific how controller is doing it. There are lots of option to implement it, and I can't answer if just plugging it will do the trick.  
 

ps. SATA SSD are 5V, so old powerbank and adapters from USB to molex/SATA could do the trick.        
 

 

[NewMaxx]

That's true, it is continuous, but it's dependent on a lot of factors if you're not talking just cold storage. Temperature is one, including delta or cross temperature which is the difference between when data is programmed and read (which is also adjusted for). There's different kinds of retention loss or rather things that can accumulate errors such as read and program disturb which is why I mentioned that it's not always a unidirectional impact on voltage thresholds (which of course is made more complicated by more bits per cell). Of course if the drive is regularly attached to a system and powered-on it will do regular checks at power-on along with other tasks, if not during GC.

 

The 840 EVO is a legendary example (it actually had to be fixed twice) but more recent would be some WD Blue SATA drives and also some Crucial MX500s. In the former case, data was kept stale too long (which reduces wear from rewrites but increases read latency) and in the later case refreshed too often (increased write amplification). This is also a balance made more complicated by SLC caching and garbage collection algorithms.

 

For my information on data retention here I referred to multiple patents including one from SMI (which manufactures controllers). These patents explain in more detail how data age is tracked, time discovered (host/timer), and how the controller can quickly sample from a block group based on similar characteristics. How often it does this is related to historical factors including wear. Typically you do need a real time clock (RTC) which requires more than just power (has to poll the host) but the drive is capable of sampling for errors on power-on as mentioned, so the reason you take the steps suggested above is to make sure your data is refreshed.