many of the responses to this question involve degradation of the device itself due to reading/write.
I’m curious If i had data on a device and I left in in a drawer or attic for years, how long could it sit there before it just goes bad on its own? No reading and writing. Say you wanted to save home movies or photos etc. Something you don’t look at every day but would one day like to dust off and show your family.
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A high quality CD or DVD transfer is the answer for longevity. According to the Canadian Conservation Institute you can get up to 100 years. Long article on the issue, jump to the summary at the bottom for best practices and expected lifetime for various types of CD, DVD and BD-Rs (Blu-ray): Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays — Canadian Conservation Institute
If you want permanent storage get a NAS with 2 drives that mirror each other.
That’s not permanent. If you want some degree of permanence you’ll want archival grade media
That’s not permanent, real permanent would be a Cloud option like OneDrive/GoogleDrive, etc.
Roughly 10 years without being plug.
After that the data can be corrupted, even if the drive still work.
Recent ssd’s claim to retain data for much longer periods of time, untested in real life situations though. But true that non recent ssd’s lose data after a while when not being turned on
leaving it unused in a drawer should be ok, having multiple copies is best for that sort of thing
some of my drives are a tad slow, so get a usb fast stick and copy the stuff over