Offsite Vaulting for Hard Drives and SSDs

Unpowered SSDs lose charge over time, and the rate roughly doubles with every rise in storage temperature. A drive left in a hot room for two years may not read at all. Spinning disks have the opposite problem — humidity and stiction. Both fail silently, and both are usually discovered during a legal hold.

• ◆Climate control addresses the actual failure mode for both media types, not just theft.
• ◆Individually barcoded and shelved, so a single drive can be pulled without disturbing the set.
• ◆Air-gapped storage — a forensic image in a vault cannot be altered, which is the point of holding one.
• ◆Documented custody from your door to the shelf, which matters if the drive ever becomes evidence.

Priced per drive with a monthly minimum. Bare drives are accepted in anti-static packaging; we can supply it. Sealed evidence bags stay sealed and are recorded as such.

Drives are logged by serial number, not by description, because a shelf of identical black enclosures is otherwise unmanageable. Each unit is recorded at intake against the depositor's own reference, sealed, and stored upright with stable climate. We do not power drives on, image them, or read their contents. That is deliberate: the moment a custodian reads a drive, the custody record stops being a simple chain and becomes a question about what was accessed and by whom.

The two failure modes pull in opposite directions. Spinning disks left unpowered for years can suffer mechanical problems on spin-up, particularly if they were stored in heat. Solid-state drives have a different weakness — unpowered charge retention degrades over time, and it degrades faster at high temperature. Neither is a reason to avoid storage; both are a reason not to treat any single drive as an archive. Anything you genuinely cannot lose should exist on more than one medium, and climate control extends the window rather than removing the limit.