Hatta wrote:A little googling yielded this
research paper that quotes Flash data retention at around 100 years, even longer than standard EEPROMs.
Here is a data sheet from TI with some nice graphs showing how they get these numbers.
I suspect your USB key corruption is due not to aging of the flash, but possibly a flaky controller or an electrically noisy environment. Pockets are staticy places. The quality of flash memory is probably highly variable too. If designed well however, a flash based cartridge should be every bit as reliable as the EPROM cartridges we all love.
I am not sure what to say about the post immediately preceding this one. I'll just point out that battery backed save RAM is volatile and nonmagnetic, hard disks are non-volatile and magnetic. Flash memory is nonvolatile and nonmagnetic. They are all going to suffer from distinct failure modes.
What you linked me to was data remanence.
Data remanence is not data degradation. These are two completely different things.
Degradation is where the data begins to corrupt and disappear over time.
Remanence is when after formatting you can still extract bits and pieces of the first data you wrote to the discs.
Also, the cartridges we have bought from companies for decades AREN'T EEPROMS. They are Mask ROMS. Mask ROMS (to say it as simply as possible and not really into any detail) are basically grid array chips where they have a fixed metal data grid and burn all of the data into it. This basically amounts to a large logic circuit on a chip.
The data will never fade away period, and is permanently stored until the chip itself is crushed to bits with a hammer.