Someone a while back put a set of very cheap SSDs through a torture test, and after exhausting many of the write cycles, left them alone for months. When powered back on for reads, the drives were slow as the error correction hardware was working overtime to compensate for the loss of trapped charge over time, but mostly recovered their performance after a while.
That said, I have a similar anecdote where one of my very worn test bench SSDs kept complaining about the same bad sectors despite OS reinstalls until I just overwrote it with zeros using dd. Was fine for many months thereafter.
I’ve no idea either if SpinRite has some secret sauce that FOSS utilities have yet to replicate, but it sounds like a non-destructive read-write test with badblocks ought to do the same.
Also, my CF cards, SD cards, or USB drives from the early 2000s and early 2010s almost never give me trouble despite spending years unplugged. More recent flash memory is a different story though and I suspect the shrinking gate sizes and advent of TLC/QLC/PLC haven’t helped. I’ll usually splurge a little these days to get the industrial or high endurance MLC flavors and hopefully avoid the issue.
Someone a while back put a set of very cheap SSDs through a torture test, and after exhausting many of the write cycles, left them alone for months. When powered back on for reads, the drives were slow as the error correction hardware was working overtime to compensate for the loss of trapped charge over time, but mostly recovered their performance after a while.
That said, I have a similar anecdote where one of my very worn test bench SSDs kept complaining about the same bad sectors despite OS reinstalls until I just overwrote it with zeros using
dd. Was fine for many months thereafter.I’ve no idea either if SpinRite has some secret sauce that FOSS utilities have yet to replicate, but it sounds like a non-destructive read-write test with
badblocksought to do the same.Also, my CF cards, SD cards, or USB drives from the early 2000s and early 2010s almost never give me trouble despite spending years unplugged. More recent flash memory is a different story though and I suspect the shrinking gate sizes and advent of TLC/QLC/PLC haven’t helped. I’ll usually splurge a little these days to get the industrial or high endurance MLC flavors and hopefully avoid the issue.