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.
If you want permanent storage get a NAS with 2 drives that mirror each other.
That’s not permanent, real permanent would be a Cloud option like OneDrive/GoogleDrive, etc.
That’s not permanent. If you want some degree of permanence you’ll want archival grade media