If I remember right, flash memory is basically based on static electricity and those cheap SD cards might self-wipe after a couple years being unplugged

but maybe not lol

Mostly just a small-ish info dump in the event it helps anyone. All flash and nand media can self-wipe if not used for a couple of years (though nand can last longer but may start to slow down to SATA and slower). Even if in an active PC, the parts that are only read but not written this can happen. Learned that from some episodes of "Security Now" podcast and personally saw it happen with a PC I was trying to fix for someone. On the show one of the hosts has a commercal program called "SpinRite" that was made to help with HDDs that have non-moter/actuator issues revive sectors.

Some testers using it found that it also helps with nand that has drastically slowed down from reading spots that never really get writes come back to normal speeds. In my case, I tried it on the PC I was working on and it really did help (the OS was already borked so it wasn't going to hurt trying it out) with it loading much faster. Obviously the cheaper the flash/nand the faster issues will happen.

I have seen some random motherboards offer basically a pre-erase on SSDs that are acting slow before you re-install the OS to make sure a more complete flipping of cells happens and not just a basic formatting that just zeros the first parts of data and leaves the other cells alone. In that case the data/OS isn't the focus and wouldn't need a special paid software (I am only aware of SpinRite just because of the podcast and bought it to support the host that makes it). I am not sure of any free/FOSS software that does the same full drive cell flips, but I imagine there are some (or will be as flash/nand is used more and more).

Main take away is that it is important to make sure to not just let flash drives/SD/nand drives sit without at least hooking up to a PC every now and then. My PS Vita fell victim to just sitting around dead for a few years along with the Vita card I had in it. Fortunately the ROM with the OS is still working and I was able to at least set it up again.

Someone a while back put a set of very cheap SSDs through a torture test, and after exhausting many of the write cycles, left them alone for months. When powered back on for reads, the drives were slow as the error correction hardware was working overtime to compensate for the loss of trapped charge over time, but mostly recovered their performance after a while.

That said, I have a similar anecdote where one of my very worn test bench SSDs kept complaining about the same bad sectors despite OS reinstalls until I just overwrote it with zeros using dd. Was fine for many months thereafter.

I've no idea either if SpinRite has some secret sauce that FOSS utilities have yet to replicate, but it sounds like a non-destructive read-write test with badblocks ought to do the same.

Also, my CF cards, SD cards, or USB drives from the early 2000s and early 2010s almost never give me trouble despite spending years unplugged. More recent flash memory is a different story though and I suspect the shrinking gate sizes and advent of TLC/QLC/PLC haven't helped. I'll usually splurge a little these days to get the industrial or high endurance MLC flavors and hopefully avoid the issue.

Serious question: Do I have to be a jew in order to use it?

(Because KZs and im German and stuff)

Once upon a time I owned a GameCube memory card, specifically so that I could have my own save progression when visiting my friend's house (who actually owned the GameCube and games). That may not really apply anymore?

On another note though, making the sd card read only means it will last significantly longer. Flash storage (like SD cards) have limited write cycles, so this preserves the games themselves while leaving the much smaller save files to be written somewhere else where they're easier to back up.

I hate that shit like this is literally used to defend Israel. Even now we'll see articles written that are finally acknowledging Israels crimes. But they always have to add "well Israel says it isn't".

Giving even a crumb of text to say "what Israel says" should be considered a crime of propaganda and incitement of genocide at this point. If it's not followed by a clear statement that their words are just more lies. Journalist can come to conclusions from evidence and I'm sick of this gross "both sides" shit western media continues to do.

There is no reason to tell us what excuses a genocidal ethno supremacist state is making. I'm so tired of having to hear:

"so-and-so well respected institution has finally said something is a genocide after two years of watching a genocide happen. BUT the state doing the genocide also says 'nah, we aren't'"

It's just gross.

However, when speaking in Hebrew in the Israeli press, Israeli politicians, generals, religious leaders, and political commentators regularly make genocidal statements,expressing their desire to “destroy Amalek,” starve Palestinians into submission, flatten Gaza, and ethnically cleanse it of its roughly 2 million inhabitants.”

A bit tangential, but it super funny when I mention this fact to staunch Israel supporters in my social periphery, they ask me how I know Hebrew. I say I don't, I use a combo of Google/Firefox translate and GPT to read these articles in English, and this is suddenly when they start having issues with AI being misused and inaccurate. Not when it's being used to indiscriminately bomb a place. I wish I were making this up.