> I've heard conflicting reports on this. I've seen conflicting reports, too—at least in the popular press and tech forums. Filtering down to reports with clea

> I've heard conflicting reports on this. I've seen conflicting reports, too—at least in the popular press and tech forums. Filtering down to reports with clear sourcing back to actual academic or industry research, the confusion pretty much goes away. This is an issue where the actual facts have been oversimplified and dumbed down and wrong interpretations have caught on and been repeated by people with no understanding of the underlying mechanisms for data loss and for forestalling the data loss. In particular, there are tons of people on forums like /r/hardware who think that plugging in the SSD will prevent charge from leaking out of a floating gate memory cell or the charge trap memory cells now used by almost all SSDs. It won't. Using the SSD can lead to data being re-written before it has degraded unrecoverably, through several possible mechanisms. But aside from drives like the Samsung 840 and 840 EVO that were retrofitted with explicit data degradation checks as part of their firmware's operation, merely leaving the drive plugged in will not help directly, and the temperature effects compared to leaving it on a shelf will be a slight detriment to data retention. It's helpful to recall that the JEDEC standards for SSD write endurance require consumer drives to provide 1 year of unpowered data retention for a drive that has reached the end of its write endurance. For brand-new flash, the leakage is orders of magnitude slower than for worn-out flash, so it's quite reasonable to expect data retention comparable to some of the storage mediums that actually make economic sense for archival.