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Take note, heat can kill data stored on SSDs

By Kenny Yeo - on 15 May 2015, 9:46am

Take note, heat can kill data stored on SSDs

SSDs are many times faster than hard disk drives and are only becoming more and more affordable.

SSDs have never been more affordable and an increasing number of OEMs and users are turning to SSDs to improve their systems' performance.

However, according to a paper from Alvin Cox, a senior researcher from Seagate, that was published by the JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council), it was revealed that heat can have a significant negative impact on the lifespan of data stored in SSDs.

The paper states that the average "shelf life" of data stored on a high quality consumer or enterprise SSD is around two years, if the drive is not powered on and if it is stored at a relatively cool 25 degrees Celsius. However, this time span halves for every 5 degrees Celsius increase in temperature.

This means that in tropical climates or warm summers where temperatures can reach around 35 degrees Celsius, your data will have a life span of just six months. This applies not just to SSDs, but to any device that uses NAND memory, including smartphones and portable media players.

Fortunately, this applies only to drives that do not get powered on, so this would not be a problem for most users who power up their devices daily. But if you have devices using flash memory that are sitting around for most parts of the time, maybe it's a good idea to power them up once awhile to check. The alternative is to keep these devices in a cool environment or simply just backup these devices frequently to a mechanical hard disk drive.

Source: Dailytech

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