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Debunked: Your SSD won't lose data if left unplugged after all


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Once again, FUD had the internet freaking out over nothing...

 

If you’re in a panic because the Internet told you that your shiny new SSD may lose data in “just a few days” when stored in a hot room, take a chill pill—it’s apparently all a huge misunderstanding, according to the man who wrote the original presentation all the fear is based on.

 

In a conversation with Kent Smith of Seagate and Alvin Cox, the Seagate engineer who wrote the presentation that set the Internet abuzz, PCWorld was told we’re all just reading it wrong.

 

“People have misunderstood the data that they’re looking at,” Smith said.

 

Cox agreed saying there’s no reason to fret.

 

“I wouldn’t worry about (losing data),” Cox told PCWorld. “This all pertains to end of life. As a consumer, an SSD product or even a flash product is never going to get to the point where it’s temperature-dependent on retaining the data.”

 

Why this matters:

 

Users from New York to Rio De Janiero are freaking out over the risk of their SSDs losing data when powered off so we decided to go to the source of it all for the truth.

 

ssd_jedec-100586326-large.png

 

It looks like a misunderstanding of this 5-year-old PowerPoint page set the Internet ablaze

 

The original presentation dates back to when Cox was a chairman on a JEDEC committee, the industry group that blesses memory specs. It was intended to help data center and enterprise customers understand what could happen to an SSD—but only after it had reached the end of its useful life span and then stored at abnormal temperatures. It’s not intended to be applied to an SSD in the prime of its life in either an enterprise or a consumer product.

 

But that’s not how the Internet viewed it. The presentation—almost five years old now—surfaced in a forensic computing blogas to why an SSD could start to lose data in a short amount of time at high temperatures. Once media outlets jumped on the story, the ripple spread across the globe.....

 

http://www.pcworld.c...-after-all.html

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personally, given Seagates track record with HD reliability, I would not take any papers from them seriously.

 

i think the story got legs to the Samsung bug with one of their SSD's lines.

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