Stefan Mileschin

In the past week, quite a few media outlets have posted articles claiming that SSDs will lose data in a matter of days if left unpowered. While there is some (read: very, very little) truth to that, it has created a lot of chatter and confusion in forums and even I have received a few questions about the validity of the claims, so rather than responding to individual emails/tweets from people who want to know more, I thought I would explain the matter in depth to everyone at once.

First of all, the presentation everyone is talking about can be found here. Unlike some sites reported, it's not a presentation from Seagate -- it's an official JEDEC presentation from Alvin Cox, the Chairman of JC-64.8 subcommittee (i.e. SSD committee) at the time, meaning that it's supposed to act as an objective source of information for all SSD vendors. It is, however, correct that Mr. Cox works as a Senior Staff Engineer at Seagate, but that is irrelevant because the whole purpose of JEDEC is to bring manufacturers together to develop open standards. The committee members and chairmen are all working for some company and currently the JC-64.8 subcommittee is lead by Frank Chu from HGST.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/t...data-retention