If you’ve been treating old SSDs like long-term storage drives, the kind you fill with photos, documents or backups and then shove in a drawer “for safekeeping,” there’s some research you’ll want to pay attention to.
As reported by XDA Developers, despite their speed and convenience, consumer SSDs don’t hold data indefinitely when left unpowered, and your archived files may quietly be degrading without you realising.
The problem comes down to how SSDs store information. Instead of magnetising physical disks like a hard drive, SSDs rely on electrical charges inside NAND flash cells. Those charges fade over time when the drive isn’t plugged in, and how quickly that happens depends heavily on the type of NAND used.
According to industry research, most consumer SSDs use TLC or QLC NAND, which can only reliably retain data for around 1–3 years without power. High-end MLC can stretch to around five years, while old-school SLC is the only tier capable of hitting a decade, and that’s found almost exclusively in industrial hardware, not the average SATA or NVMe drive sitting in a home drawer.
Once that charge drops below a certain threshold, the drive can become partially corrupted or in the worst cases totally unreadable. It’s one of the reasons many professionals still prefer HDDs, magnetic tape, or M-Disc for true long-term archiving.
That said, most people don’t need to panic. This issue really affects cold storage, drives that sit unpowered for years. If you’re using an SSD in your PC, laptop or console and it’s only left unplugged for a few weeks or months at a time, you’re unlikely to see any problems. In fact, most SSD failures users experience come from rare electrical faults or worn flash cells, not slow voltage loss.
But the takeaway is simple: an SSD is not a store it and forget it archive drive. If you have old SSDs filled with photos, work files or backups, now is the time to plug them in and check that everything still reads correctly.
And regardless of what storage you use, the safest plan hasn’t changed: keep multiple backups.
SSDs are fantastic for day-to-day use, but for long-term preservation, they’re simply not built to sit unpowered for years. If you’ve been relying on them for that, now’s the time to rethink your strategy, and rescue your data while you still can.
