alt Hacker NewsPerhaps their usual buyers just care less about retention?
Those drives aren't going to be used for cold storage, and it is basically a guarantee that there will be checksums and some form of redundancy. Who cares whether the data is retained for 10 or for 15 years after writing when you can do a low-priority background scrub of the entire drive once a month, and when there are already mechanisms in place to account for full-drive failure?
QLC retention reported to be around 1 year in unpowered state. I would assume, that drive does background refresh, though. No idea what effect it has on total drive lifetime. It is still mean that if you use it for cold storage it has to be powered.