Stefan Mileschin

Solid State Drives (SSD) can start to lose their data and become corrupted if they are left without power for as little as a week, according to a new Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) report.

Seagate’s Alvin Cox, who is also chairman of the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), wrote that the time that data will be retained on an SSD is halved for every 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperature in the area where the SSD is stored.

Consumer class SSDs can store data for up to two years before the standard drops, but when it comes to SSDs used by enterprises, the drives are only expected to retain data for a period of three months.

This could mean that all those people using SSDs in both consumer and enterprise applications could be in grave trouble if data storage is important and might be needed for longer than three months.

On the back of the report, security companies are warning that SSD users need to make sure to regularly back up their data and create drive images, or they will risk losing their data, which can have disastrous consequences.

The long term stability of SSDs has been questioned for a long time and had been the reason that ordinary hard drives have not disappeared overnight. But a three month turn around month corruption figure had not been widely known.

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