It seems kinda funny to do an introductory post...

J. Q. Public doesn't really care.

As for early adoption of the SSD, I was a pretty early adopter and nothing bricked on me without giving me warning that it was gonna happen.
The first time it happened, I was using pbuilder on Debian, a lot. Pbuilder is used to build packages, by first unpacking and installing a apt cache into a chroot, and then unpacking a source tarball, all to the file system, for each and every build, whether the package cache changes or not. And I was building a lot of packages for free software debian would just never package, as well as new releases of my own packages, back then. Hence, why SSD's seemed a miracle to me.

One day I started a pbuilder, it was in the middle of unpacking, and it died. The SSD was bricked, never to read or write anything again This actually is what led me to create cape devtools, which are now called produceit. My first observation is that redhat mock can work with "dirty" chroots, rather than constantly rebuilding the chroot from scratch with the exact same cache and producing the exact same chroot install result. So I created instead a dirty chroot build manager, and also adapted it to use tooling from inside the chroot itself, and then saved that in an unpackaged directory tree. I also could unpack the deb sources into a ramdisk chroot thru bind mounts to re-animate the chroot for a build session. Almost no disk activity at all for builds... I now mostly use produceit to build AlpineLinux packages here.

When I was done I had a debian build system that did not even have to run on debian, either. And then I adapted it to replace mock and friends on redhat, too. So now I could build redhat packages also without redhat. I thought about what I wanted my main build & dev machine to be, and I chose arch, for the simple reason that they were close to upstream and minimized distro specific patching. This worked great until I was doing an arch upgrade a few months later, with a new and different brand of ssd, and sure enough, in the middle of updates, suddenly a bunch of disk errors popped up, and it failed. But the drive fsck'd good and "seemed" usable. So I tried the update again, and in the middle of that try the newer drive bricked, too...

Is that what you mean by "warning"? ;). Of curse this was a decade ago...
 


No, mine always started throwing various errors when creating/moving files and SMART would let me know it was failing with a bunch of bad sectors. Out of the first few, only a couple failed "quickly". The others would last for about as long as I would expect. Today, the MTBF of an SSD can be about the same as your spinning platter HDD which is something I find pretty amazing.
 
Wait until you try the NVMe M.2 SSDs... The difference is amazing.

My Tower is 9 yrs old and the motherboard doesn't have a M.2 slot...the Drive bays are 3.5 inch. I had to buy several 2.5 inch SSD brackets so my SSDs would fit.
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My Tower is 9 yrs old and the motherboard doesn't have a M.2 slot..
if you have a spare PCI slot
 
As @Brickwizard said, you can get a riser card.

The difference between the two is night and day. To install an OS only takes a few minutes during the write data to disk phase. I was amazed when I first saw it in person.
 
if you have a spare PCI slot
Thanks but I'm happy with my SSDs for now.
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Welcome aboard hope enjoy your times spent here.
 
Wait until you try the NVMe M.2 SSDs... The difference is amazing.
I upgraded my 2015 MacBook Air with an NVMe, it was faster, but not that much faster. Obviously because my older Mac has performance limitations, it couldn't fully utilize the upgrade, doesn't have a PCIe buss.
 
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I like the conspirator part. I have conspired, for years, to learn some of the more difficult programming languages, but I am still trying. Nyuk, Nyuk!
 
My Tower is 9 yrs old and the motherboard doesn't have a M.2 slot...the Drive bays are 3.5 inch. I had to buy several 2.5 inch SSD brackets so my SSDs would fit.
happy0035.gif
You can now buy plug in pci or pci express boards with m2 slots built in, so you can update your old kit.
 

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