My experiment with flash

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Well… I read many times that flash fries are not suitable for long-term backups or that data can be lost on them.

So I decided to test it myself.

Four years ago I bought this one

Picture

713518ee-e2d3-4fd1-8b8e-ea5fc83eb691
713518ee-e2d3-4fd1-8b8e-ea5fc83eb6911897×2008 326 KB

It was super cheap. Like 5 bucks or something.

So I stored on it test video file and wrote down sha256

Here how it was on moment of creation:

903f401ab21cf105*********a467915280a85d7c70cbbcaed486******1928a

(I hid part of it, yes i know hash cannot be recovered, yes I am paranoid.)

After creation, that flash NEVER touched again (no plugging in, no writes, no checks, no reads)

After 4 years I plugged it in USB port and checked hash again:

sha256sum video.mp4
903f401ab21cf105*********a467915280a85d7c70cbbcaed486******1928a video.mp4

As you can see file NOT corrupted.

So I think you can use flash as backup solution (but I still think it is not really good idea) if you flash not worn out (read as “old”), you won’t be doomed if this data will be corrupted.

But even if you consider flash as backup storage, get at least 3 of them to follow 3-2-1 rule.

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USB bricked during Veracrypt encryption?
2

If you put it in a refrigerator flash should last longer according to Steve Gibson.

And as I mentioned, one thing that has not been mentioned, which we know from physics, is that temperature is crucially important. Several years ago we covered a piece of news here that noted that offline SSDs stored in hot data centers tended to lose their data more quickly than those same SSDs stored in a cool environment. Heat inherently agitates electrons and increases the probability that one will make it across the cell’s insulating barrier. It’s known as tunneling. So if you do have any offline SSDs or thumb drives where you have important data stored, I’d give them a full data rewrite pass, you know, SpinRite’s able to do that using Level 3, then put them in a Ziploc bag in, you guessed it, a refrigerator, or at least store them somewhere which is guaranteed to stay mostly cool.

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I know, but my experiment was to test, if new, non worn-off flash can handle something like WORM (write onece read many) without connecting to PC for a long time. As experiment showed, yes it can.

But it still unreliable for backups. But if you need backup now, use at least 2 flash…

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