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Play your 3DS, Vita, Switch games once in a while (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world
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Taken from bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/simplyaj.com/post/3mtq6av6yp226

Plus a sidenote from this person on DS games: https://bsky.app/profile/simplyaj.com/post/3mttai4jaz22j

Not sure on the technical details of exactly how long they last, but I've heard similar things several times before.

Always depressing to be reminded of this. Haven't had many fail, but honestly haven't tried a lot of my 3DS/Vita games in a while, so who knows.

If nothing else tho, it's nice to have an excuse to revisit some things. Once you boot it up, you might find yourself enjoying the reminiscing. :)

Image of a tweet on Bluesky that says "Friendly Reminder: 3DS, Vita and Switch all use a type of flash memory that needs an electrical charge every decade or so to keep the game data from corrupting. TLDR: Boot up all your games and make a save on them to help preserve them into the future!"
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[–] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (4 children)

Is this also true for USB thumb drives and other flash memory media? Cuz uh... I might have to plug some shit in so it doesn't break. Nearly all my thumbdrives are over or approaching 10 years old.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago*

    Short answer: It depends. Doing full flash reads of your USB sticks and SD cards (dd if=/dev/XXX of=/dev/null bs=4k status=progress) may help for a lot of them. But not all. The only solution I can actually recommend (for any storage media) is backup them up and regularly testing/moving the backups.

    If the read of the disk is particularly slow then that indicates the flash cells are degraded. If a second read of the disk is much faster then that indicates some action may have been taken by the flash controller IC to fix this.

    Long answer:

    NAND flash cells slowly leak charge, making their state indistinguishable. A flash controller IC (usually separate to the NAND flash IC or ICs) has the job of noticing and fixing this (by rewriting the data to another or the same cell) before it gets too bad. That doesn't necessarily mean it does it particularly well.

    Some (few?) flash controllers periodically scan for weak cells and rewrite to fix them. Some (most?) flash controllers notice weak cells only when you read them. Some (many?) flash controllers are shit and don't do any of this.

    Flash controllers also have a bunch of other features and jobs, like maintaining a spare pool of cells (over-provisioning) to swap out for bad ones and even forcing the USB stick into read-only mode if they think things have gone particularly bad. Again this varies a lot depending on implem, some do it, some don't, and for different reasons (out of over-provis cells, corrupt mapping metadata, arbitrary thresholds, etc).

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    USB/Flash memory is not an archival storage medium. It is far to volatile, so as long as you are not using USB sticks as an long term archive for precious, irreplaceable documents/data, it shouldnt be a big deal to you.

    Flash memory will self-erase if left idle/unplugged for a long enough time.

    Mechanical hard drives can be archival, but you cant just load them up with data and shove them in a closet.. They need to be hooked back up and spun up every month or so, to keep lube moved around and keep platters and arms freely movable.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 child)

    I don't mean data already stored on them, I mean their ability to still have data written to them in the first place. There's really only two things I use them for: Moving print files to my 3D printer (no networking, and direct USB connection is wonky af), or to reinstall an OS. So they don't get regular use and thus don't see regular electricity running through 'em.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago

    thats a big i'unno. depends on the chips, the controllers, the usage of the drive, etc.

    personally, usb sticks are basically a commodity consumable (especially if you get them at the sweetheart size) and i don't consider it wasteful to replace them after 3-5 years if you are doing anything remotely important with them.

    but if you just have them for transfering files from one PC to another in your own house, where a loss won't be catastrophic, just a mild perturberance, then use it till it physically doesnt work anymore

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