It's only a matter of time before SSD prices cut below HDD and all that spinning rust is thrown in the garbage.
Also I'm not sure what datacentres you work in but I've never heard of one being turned off for six months. You can spin down drives when they're not in use, but that's mostly to save energy. An idle SSD uses almost no power, there's no reason to spin it down.
> Digital evidence storage for legal matters is a common practice. As the use of Solid State Drives (SSD) in consumer and enterprise computers has increased, so too has the number of SSDs in storage increased. When most, if not all, of the drives in storage were mechanical, there was little chance of silent data corruption as long as the environment in the storage enclosure maintained reasonable thresholds. The same is not true for SSDs.
...
> For client application SSDs, the powered-off retention period standard is one year while enterprise application SSDs have a powered-off retention period of three months. These retention periods can vary greatly depending on the temperature of the storage area that houses SSDs.
...
> The standards change dramatically when you consider JEDEC's standards for enterprise class drives. The storage standard for this class of drive at the same operating temperature as the consumer class drive drops from 2 years under optimal conditions to 20 weeks. Five degrees of temperature rise in the storage environment drops the data retention period to 10 weeks. Overall, JEDEC lists a 3-month period of data retention as the standard for enterprise class drives.
> A check of various drive manufacturers, in this case Samsung, Intel, and Seagate, shows that their ratings for data retention of their consumer class drives are what would be expected for JEDEC's enterprise class drive standards. All three quote a nominal 3-month retention time period. Most likely, the manufacturers are being conservative; however, it demonstrates the potential variability the manufacturers associate with data retention on any SSD in storage.
I know there's a ridiculous amount of offline data that must be maintained and tapes aren't always a practical solution.
Manufacturers are being very conservative when it comes to retention times. I haven't heard of anyone losing data because they left their SSD powered off for two long, but if you have any anecdotes or reports to share, by all means.
Early SSDs were temperamental, flaky, and would burn out quickly. The current generation is durable, almost impossible to burn out, and seems to hold data for years even when powered off. It's like the bad rap that plasma screens got for burning in even when that problem was addressed by the manufacturers.
The issue in the article is that as spinners have become more dense, the track tolerance has decreased. Those small tolerance high density disks must already be expensive, and if they further can't reliably survive the environment (which includes fire suppression), then replacement with SSDs starts to look mandatory on the near horizon.