hey friends. im shopping for computer parts for the first time ever - just internal hard drives, but it's still something i don't know a whole bunch about
i'm looking for two internal SSDs, one (but not both) of which NVMe
is there anything i should keep in mind while shopping? any common hard drive pitfalls to be wary of? tips for not buying the wrong thing or screwing up the installation?
after a bit of research i figured i should clarify what im looking for
the non-nvme ssd is for a network file server, so i care about big storage, frequent reads, infrequent writes. not so much about ultra speed
@typhlosion if you don't care about speed, why not use a cheaper SMR hard drive?
-F
@Hearth yeah im considering it. currently the only drive in that computer is a HDD and i want *some* kind of SSD in there to boot from so it doesn't take three minutes to boot. but i guess i could just get another HDD for the actual storage. i dunno
@Hearth the other consideration is reliability - my understanding is that an ssd has longer MTBF in general than an hdd, and also i'm moving soon and it would be nice for peace of mind to minimize the risk of accidentally fucking something up while handling my computer down the stairs - i dunno, maybe i'm too worried about such things
@typhlosion ah, it depends! for your case with infrequent writes, yeah the MTBF of an ssd is probably longer. for cases with frequent writes solid state MTBF can be pitifully low, especially for high-density multi-layer cell types that might have a write endurance measured in the hundreds
-F
@typhlosion @Hearth for what it's worth, we've used the same boot SSD for well over half a decade. we only stopped using it because higher SSD capacities had become cheaper, and it's now our windows drive
i think the drive itself is a decade old now
-- freya raccooncat 
@typhlosion the only answer we can give is that it depends a lot
when they say drive writes, they're referring to writing to the entire drive, not just a single write event
actual endurance depends on what's being written (both how much and what exact data, because writing a modified version of an existing file can actually modify less than the total file size) and how good the wear levelling algorithm is
-F
@typhlosion so the drive writes per day metric basically only applies if you're constantly wiping the entire drive and writing a full howevermany TB to it, which is not exactly a standard use case
-F
@Hearth im trying to do research on this and people keep saying that the lifetime of an SSD is pretty predictable but they keep phrasing it in terms like "drive writes per day" and "cell write endurance" that seem to require an understanding of how exactly SSDs work in order to turn them into a consumer-usable measure of how long i can expect my $200 piece of hardware to last in practice