Yesterday I learned that USB SSDs suffer data fade (bit rot) after about 1-2 years. But you can avoid this just by plugging them in for a few hours at least once a year. This lets the controller refresh all the weak leaky data.
Discussion
The wildest thing
HOW DOES IT HAPPEN?
this is why i said rotational for cold storage
SSD for active use
SSDs wear from write cycles so unless you constantly write terabytes of data they should last pretty good
on other hand rotational drives run hot just from spinning and even if you need to read 1 byte they have to spin up and you have to wait for them to do it
so i say keep rotational drives in the basement and SSDs in your PC
by the way don't believe anything i say i just make everything up
do your own research
Kind of makes sense, but I don't remember seeing that algorithm in the firmware
also run cat /dev/sda, sometimes you may need to trigger a read
gonna do that on my devices... even though i do use them fairly often... one of them has an overheating problem, and all of them, even though they have a very decent thermal contact to a decent aluminium heatsink-case, slow down a lot after writing for more than about 5 minutes
also, better to do this:
sudo cat /dev/sda > /dev/null