Humidity reliability of commercial flash memories for long-term storage

To investigate the feasibility of flash memory reliability in an environment for the application of long-term data storage, temperature and humidity acceleration tests have been carried out for commercial flash memories. Nine commercial 16GB SD cards with conventional package were kept in a test chamber of 85 °C/85%RH for up to 3040 h and we checked the write/read operation using free software "Check Flash" after the storage test. The lifetime against humidity is predicted by the power law humidity model (Peck model), which is widely used for the lifetime prediction, assuming the average parameters such as humidity acceleration factor (n) and activation energy () from the literatures. Although further studies to assure the reliability, the results indicate that commercial flash memories preliminary have the feasibility of a long-term storage media over 100 years.