Are Portable SSD's Good for Backup Purposes? How long will they last? And what about 'bit-rot'?


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I use Microsoft Money from 2005. The data file I use daily has 25 years of transactions which I have wish to lose. Treasured photos and videos fall into the same category.
Just delete it, you'll lose it. :lmao:
 

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I've read something about that too and very recently. It might even have been on here. I think one point was that SSD's should be powered up relatively frequently to 'refresh' them since they work by retaining microscopic levels of electrical charge on the mosfet transistors that make up each cell... a little bit like a capacitor that holds charge. If that charge leaks away then the logic state of the cell is lost meaning the date (whether it was a 1 or a 0 is lost). The drive is still good but the data lost. In other words they are not suitable to use for storing data over many many months and years without ever being powered up unlike traditional HDD's. If you are using them frequently (few times a year) there should be no issue.

It is called data retention period, and depends on the temperature it is stored at without power. It is specified by a JEDEC standard minimum requirement:

So a year at 30c no power

Screenshot 2025-05-18 154001.webp
Screenshot 2023-02-15 150352.webp

 
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I did find this webpage that discusses the data retention of SSD drives. No doubt this is under ideal conditions:


They claim at the beginning of the article that retention can be as much as 3 to 5 years unpowered, but later in the article they are talking about one year or less when stored unpowered at 30C. I suspect that the 3 to 5 year figures are given by the manufacturers and are under optimal conditions.

I suggest that if you are going to use an SSD for backup that you refresh it every so often.

Some flash chips that are available commercially have a retention spec of up to 10 years, but this is not NAND flash as used in SSDs. The 10 year retention ones are used in memory applications where small amounts of permanent storage are needed. These chips are usually not written to very often, which increases their life span. I have these chips in hardware at work that has sat on the shelf for at least 7 years and the data in the flash chips is still fine.

NOR flash on the other hand, can last up to 20 years (so says the company Infineon, which makes some of these chips), but these are often small configuration chips which store information to start up FPGA and other programmable logic circuits. NOR flash is sometimes used in SSDs, but they would probably be Enterprise grade as NOR flash is more expensive than NAND flash.

If it were me, I would not trust an SSD to retain information without a refresh for more than a year, but then I am something of a cautious person when it comes to electronics and computing. YMMV.
 

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I use Microsoft Money from 2005. The data file I use daily has 25 years of transactions which I have wish to lose. Treasured photos and videos fall into the same category.
I can understand photos and videos but money transactions from 25 years ago 😱?

Each to their own of course.
 

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I did find this webpage that discusses the data retention of SSD drives. No doubt this is under ideal conditions:


They claim at the beginning of the article that retention can be as much as 3 to 5 years unpowered, but later in the article they are talking about one year or less when stored unpowered at 30C. I suspect that the 3 to 5 year figures are given by the manufacturers and are under optimal conditions.

I suggest that if you are going to use an SSD for backup that you refresh it every so often.

Some flash chips that are available commercially have a retention spec of up to 10 years, but this is not NAND flash as used in SSDs. The 10 year retention ones are used in memory applications where small amounts of permanent storage are needed. These chips are usually not written to very often, which increases their life span. I have these chips in hardware at work that has sat on the shelf for at least 7 years and the data in the flash chips is still fine.

NOR flash on the other hand, can last up to 20 years (so says the company Infineon, which makes some of these chips), but these are often small configuration chips which store information to start up FPGA and other programmable logic circuits. NOR flash is sometimes used in SSDs, but they would probably be Enterprise grade as NOR flash is more expensive than NAND flash.

If it were me, I would not trust an SSD to retain information without a refresh for more than a year, but then I am something of a cautious person when it comes to electronics and computing. YMMV.

The 1 year at 30c is for a drive at it's endurance rating (as specified by the manufacturer). A fresh new SSD has a longer lifetime.
 

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I had two small portable HHDs which I had used for the last 11 years solely for backup purposes. One of them gave a file corruption error a little while ago so I decided I had got my money's worth out of them time to ditch them and get something else.

In the end I got two of these: Samsung T7 Portable SSD - 2 TB - USB 3.2 Gen.2 External SSD

I've started using them, they work fine, and are considerably quicker than backing up to my old spinning disk drives. However, now I'm wondering if I have made a good choice in going over to SSDs. So the following questions:

Are portable SSDs a good choice for backup purposes? Are they reliable for this?

A friend of mine, though not a computer geek (nor am I) mentioned that he had read somewhere about 'bit-rot' with SSDs. He was really vague on this just saying that they made them not a good choice for backup purposes when compared to HDDs as the data on the SSD can 'rot' over time. So will my use of the SSDs suffer bit-rot over time?

I should add that my use of the drives will be restricted to once-weekly backups, the rest of the time they'll be detached from the PC and just sitting in a drawer.
I have a Samsung T7 portable SSD 2 TB too.

In general, SSDs keep their data, for about 1 year, without any use.

Hard Disks keep them for about 5 years.

If you use SSDs frequently for backups, the SSD data will be fine.
 

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I think the age old question of “How long is a piece of string?” is relevant here.
How many backups do you predict you’d make, are they incremental, are you continuously writing to the drive?
I’d imaging the longevity of the drive, like any other, would depend on the usage.

A quick search gave me this. I have no experience with them:

The number of times you can write to a Samsung T7 portable SSD depends on the type of flash memory used, but generally, SSDs are rated for between 3,000 and 100,000 write cycles. While the exact number isn't specified for the T7, it utilizes PCIe NVMe technology for high read/write speeds, which suggests it's built to handle a substantial number of write operations. The Samsung site states the T7 Touch has sequential read/write speeds of up to 1,050/1,000 MB/s, respectively.
 

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I have Samsung:
2 T5 1TB
3 T7 2TB
3 T9 4TB

That's a total of 8 Samsung Portable SSD drives and I've not had a problem with any of them. They are used daily as backup drives. For the specs and what they cost, I wouldn't expect any problems.
 

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Hi folks.

Things like ripped CD's / photos etc are often kept for years and years and are irreplaceable. Cloud services are fine for "Reasonable amounts" of data but if you have say 11 TB of Music / other multi-media etc - that's a lot of cloud storage at current prices.

However if you have 2 sets of media for your archive the chances of BOTH failing at the same time is about as likely as a load of "Undomesticated Equines " trampling through your property trashing everything. !!

Any archive or even "bog standard backup" should be stored on at least 2 separate sets of media -- if on the cloud then the cloud provider will have plenty of resilience and backup (at least ones like Google and Microsoft will) so you don't need duplicate media unless you need the data to be available even if you lose Internet connection for a while.

At current prices 10 TB of cloud storage would probably cost over €110 a month (excluding appropriate sales / other taxes in your jursisdiction) so not a realistic option for large permanent archives whatever your Internet speed.

At that price you could easily buy NEW SETS of media every month far cheaper if you were worried about archive backup media failing. !!!!!!!!!

Cheers
jimbo
 
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Thank you all for the responses. I'm happy to learn that using the SSDs once-weekly for backups should be fine. But I'm kind of perplexed on the issue of the drive being 'refreshed' as no one has said how this happens. Does this mean that once the SSD is plugged in then there is some kind of controller chip that runs through the memory cells and checks them? I mean how does it know what 'values' to 'refresh' in what cell? How does it know what cell is meant to be a 'zero' and which is meant to be a '1'?

Lastly, is it good practice to use 'trim' on the drives during every backup routine? And, if so, when is best to do this — before doing the backup, or once the backup is completed?
 

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Thank you all for the responses. I'm happy to learn that using the SSDs once-weekly for backups should be fine. But I'm kind of perplexed on the issue of the drive being 'refreshed' as no one has said how this happens. Does this mean that once the SSD is plugged in then there is some kind of controller chip that runs through the memory cells and checks them? I mean how does it know what 'values' to 'refresh' in what cell? How does it know what cell is meant to be a 'zero' and which is meant to be a '1'?

Lastly, is it good practice to use 'trim' on the drives during every backup routine? And, if so, when is best to do this — before doing the backup, or once the backup is completed?
My view on most of these type of things --unless you are a real Geek and understand Windows from top to bottom - I'd just let Windows get on with its job -- especially if you are just using these devices for backups and the like. Unless you are an inveterate gamer or need the really serious extra ounce / gram etc of performance from your machine --modern hardware is good enough now for around 95% of stuff most Windows users do I'd just leave it alone.

By all means experiment -- no probs there but don't use hardware or devices you need because you've got data on them that you really don't want to lose whether by accident, default(s) in the OS, malware etc etc.

Cheers
jimbo
 

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"Refreshing" an SSD is not a Windows issue, it's done by the SSD itself during WRITE operations. NAND cells are cleared and rewritten constantly as part of its garbage collection function... Windows hasn't got a clue that it's going on. What Windows does do is offer hints as to its usage of required virtual storage blocks... this is done by the use of the TRIM function that is part of Windows specific use of SSDs ONLY.
 

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Hi folks.

Things like ripped CD's / photos etc are often kept for years and years and are irreplaceable. Cloud services are fine for "Reasonable amounts" of data but if you have say 11 TB of Music / other multi-media etc - that's a lot of cloud storage at current prices.

However if you have 2 sets of media for your archive the chances of BOTH failing at the same time is about as likely as a load of "Undomesticated Equines " trampling through your property trashing everything. !!

Any archive or even "bog standard backup" should be stored on at least 2 separate sets of media -- if on the cloud then the cloud provider will have plenty of resilience and backup (at least ones like Google and Microsoft will) so you don't need duplicate media unless you need the data to be available even if you lose Internet connection for a while.

At current prices 10 TB of cloud storage would probably cost over €110 a month (excluding appropriate sales / other taxes in your jursisdiction) so not a realistic option for large permanent archives whatever your Internet speed.

At that price you could easily buy NEW SETS of media every month far cheaper if you were worried about archive backup media failing. !!!!!!!!!

Cheers
jimbo
I have no idea what a home user would be backing up to require multi terabytes of cloud storage.

The most important part of my cloud storage includes many thousands of irreplaceable family photos.

I have a Microsoft 365 subscription for which I pay only $69 USD annually and get 1 Terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage with all of Microsoft Office included.

My total OneDrive storage is currently:
163 GB (175,041,134,592 bytes)
46,919 Files, 17,638 Folders


I'm only using 15% of my 1.04 TB of OneDrive cloud space. And importantly, its off-site storage.
 

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    Monitor(s) Displays
    16.3 inch 4K+ OLED Infinity Edge Touch
    Screen Resolution
    3840 x 2400
    Hard Drives
    1 Terabyte M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
    Cooling
    Vapor Chamber Cooling
    Mouse
    None
    Internet Speed
    960 Mbps Netgear Mesh + 2 Satellites
    Browser
    Microsoft Edge (Chromium)
    Antivirus
    Microsoft Windows Security (Defender)
    Other Info
    Microsoft 365 subscription
    Microsoft OneDrive 1TB Cloud
    Microsoft Visual Studio
    Microsoft Visual Studio Code
    Microsoft Sysinternals Suite
    Microsoft BitLocker
    Microsoft Copilot
    Macrium Reflect X subscription
    Dell Support Assist
    Dell Command | Update
    1Password Password Manager
    Amazon Kindle for PC
    Lightroom/Photoshop subscription
    Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation
I have no idea what a home user would be backing up to require multi terabytes of cloud storage.

The most important part of my cloud storage includes many thousands of irreplaceable family photos.

I have a Microsoft 365 subscription for which I pay only $69 USD annually and get 1 Terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage with all of Microsoft Office included.

My total OneDrive storage is currently:
163 GB (175,041,134,592 bytes)
46,919 Files, 17,638 Folders


I'm only using 15% of my 1.04 TB of OneDrive cloud space. And importantly, its off-site storage.
That's the obviously the best way for you !!!

But I have over the years from analog tapes, analog vinyls or even old digital ripped CD's or other directly captured audio etc of around 14 TB of multi-media -- and 14 TB of cloud storage for stuff that doesn't actually change much so expensive cloud storage is just "Not On".

1TB for your situation and price is brilliant !! -- but as I keep saying --there's no "One size fits all" in spite of an increasingly "Binary digital world" !!.

Cheers
jimbo
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows XP,7,10,11 Linux Arch Linux
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    CPU
    2 X Intel i7

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