Earlier quoted context omitted.
NAND wear is a function of write cycles, which itself is a function of both how much data you write and how much the controller's wear-levelling and garbage collection amplifies those writes. If your benchmark is "lasting as long as well-cooled electronics" then flash already beats hard drives; since hard drives have bearings that will lose lubrication and fail until you open the drive up in a clean room and replace…
And NAND has an electrical charge that will dissipate, eventually leading to data loss. This time period is on the order of 90 days (I think I’ve seen some data sheets saying 30 days) up to one year. https://www.jedec.org/sites/default/files/Alvin_Cox%20%5BCom... https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/potential-ssd-data-loss-af... The OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification states that drives must not have data loss when powered…
The spec is 1 year minimum for client and 3mo for server, but most drives exceed that.
This thread includes a response from a Micron rep:
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/944779-enterprise-ssd...
"The very most important thing to realize when looking at these charts is that the data retention number stated are for SSDs which have reached the end of their useful life. They're worn out. If you have an enterprise-class SSD which is rated for 5 petabytes of writes over its lifetime (just to pick a typical number) , then you will not see this 3 month data retention number until you've actually written 5 petabytes to the drive. When NAND Flash is brand new out of the box, the data retention is actually several years (although we typically don't rate data retention when new).
Honestly, Flash-based storage probably isn't optimal for unpowered archiving. That three-month, EOL spec reflects this. In enterprise computing, when the NAND lifetime is used up, the intent should be to move any important data to a new device (or wipe the old device for security reasons).
In client computing (notebooks and desktops), we rarely see the typical user getting to the point where NAND wearout is a concern, so we rarely see data retention as an issue, either.
So, you needn't be concerned about data retention until your SSD gets really, really old."