I found a Kingston article about the difference between consumer and enterprise SSD drives a few days ago.

My reading of Table 1 says that a powered-down consumer drive will not start to loose / corrupt data in earlier than a year, and enterprise drives in no less than a few months.


OK  =  I just took a look at the Jedec 218b document referenced in the Kingston writeup. I believe those 3 and 12 month no-power numbers are the minimums they have to be tested to. (previous paragraph updated) Real World retention times can be longer, but not shorter. This brings an interesting question... Just how long can you keep an SSD powered down before you can no longer trust the data on it? I had always thought of SSD drives as having the same retention / archiving capability as spinning disks, but this is apparently not the case.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/ssd-reliability-in-the-real-world-googles-experience/

https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast16/technical-sessions/presentation/schroeder

If I remember correctly, SSDs are much more temperature-sensitive. I don't think I'd use one in a critical environment w/o a good RAID configuration.

That said, I run them in all of my laptops and I'm getting read to upgrade my RHEL server to them. But nothing is uber critical and I do regular (automated) backups both locally and to off-site storage (CrashPlan). I also do periodic drive cloning. So I feel pretty confident in my ability to survive a dead drive.

SSDs are also susceptible to having data corruption due to excessive write/rewrite cycles. One of the latest things is SSDs and Toughbooks, eliminates the need for the drive heater and gives a performance boost.