3 ms·

SD cards, usb sticks, and SSDs basically use the same tech where there's a mostly isolated capacitor that holds a charge. Since it's not fully isolated, there'

SD cards, usb sticks, and SSDs basically use the same tech where there's a mostly isolated capacitor that holds a charge. Since it's not fully isolated, there's going to be charge leakage when it's powered off. I think most estimates say that you'll start seeing errors and issues after about 3-5 years of being powered off. Not a great option for long term archival storage given the inherent time limits on storage life.

londons_explore 5y ago
But the leakage rate is very very dependent on temperature. Store it somewhere cool and a 5 year lifetime might be extended to 500 years. With the right tools you can read back the data and see how much degredation had occurred (even though all the data was readable). Using that info, you can have a good chance at extrapolating the time till the data becomes unreadable.