This is something I hadn't thought about until I was just reading an article.

In the recent series Silo they had removed all traces of old technology and an ancient illegal harddrive was being secretly hidden and accessed.

With a traditional HDD, or other media such as a floppy disk, the data written to the disk will remain on the disk for a long time unless temperature extremes or magnets are involved. So it was possible the data was still intact on that disk.

But if it had been an SSD or a USB drive this might have been very different. I hadn't thought about this but these devices use flash memory that need to occassionally receive power to maintain their stored data on the chips. I just looked this up and estimates are most SSD and M2 devices should store data for 2-5 years without power, but some quote 10-15 years. So definitely not for long term archival storage. For that a traditional HDD is still a more rebust solution.

Had you ever thought about this?

This also means that with more recent gaming systems now using SSDs and games stored on them into the dirtier will mean you need ro turn the systems on regularly to make sure the drives remember the data.
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