[berkes]

Not OP. But a friend photographer has a large cupboard with "pigeonholes", I think it was some old mail-sorting cabinet or so. He stacks them with labeled USB drives. Hundreds of them.

His reasoning, when I asked about "NAS" or so, was: it's cheap, it lasts, and it is cold storage. Paying for storage of that amount that is fire-, flood and software-error-proof is so much more expensive that it really was no choice. -his words-.

[teddyh]

> it lasts

Flash storage degrades, and is only expected to last about 10 years or so.

[Mediterraneo10]

Flash storage has a certain maximum number of writes and so will eventually fail as a reusable storage medium. But if you simply want to back up old photos, then you are still likely to be able to read back from the medium for much longer than 10 years.

[NateEag]

Dell says you may get as little as three months in storage from an SSD:

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/Solid...

I know someone who had their files vanish off a thumbdrive in the space of a few months of storage.

[teddyh]

Every reference I can find gives about a maximum of 10 years as the on-the-shelf, unpowered, lifetime of flash memory. Do you have a reference to some other number?