Umm... I've written almost to the entirety of my SSD and nothing wrong!

It's only a matter of time/continued doing of that. Your SSD definitely has the write endurance flaw, just like any other. There's no such thing as one that doesn't.

QLC is a newcomer to the market, I think it arrived early this year? Anyhow, the current price difference between 4TB of QLC and TLC is at $100, and that should grow as time goes on.

SLC and MLC are being phased out, because TLC has developed to the point that the shortcomings have been offset enough to be rendered nearly irrelevant. The same may eventually happen with QLC's development, but that is likely to be a couple years at least.


Samsung 860 EVO 3D TLC, $598

Samsung 860 QVO QLC, $498

Which is pretty much irrelevant if one buys a quality drive that has endurance between 600-1200 TBW, which can potentially last decades.

Win10 doesn't defrag SSDs anymore, it "optimizes" them which takes like 10 seconds.

Pretty much this.

It is now irrelevant. The write endurance was only an issue 5 years ago or so on 64GB ssds of first consumer generation.

SSD has now similar life to HDD unless one does abnormal amount of work on it. There is nothing to worry about anymore

and the performance gained compared even to fastest HDDs is massive. Not only games but just everyday tasks, like opening small programs, moving files...

and system startup.

My laptop starts in 5 seconds.

My desktop goes to loading screen faster than monitor turns on, within 30 seconds or so.

It is a must in new pc.

Comes down to price vs speed. Soon enough when it's cheaper that SSDs are the only way to go, then obviously.

I remember my dad having a tape drive and magnetic tapes for backup. They held 10Gb or something per tape. Keep in mind, the largest harddrives were like 500Mb in 1995, so that was an unbelievable amount of storage, though it was very slow to seek.

Having a small SSD for the OS and essential stuff might be worth it. Depends on the person.

Personally? I'd like saving 1Gb for running the OS entirely from RAM, then everything else from the hard drive. Fast speed after you get past the copying to ram stage.

On this day and age SSD; maybe coupled with a bigger Sata HDD as a data grave. Make sure to aim for an NVME m.2 SSD; if its a new PC it should be supported.

edit: and if money aint the problem aim for either WD black or Samsung Pro for the SSD and WD black for the normal Sata HDD.

Interestingly, if using Linux, I believe it is technically possible, without having to write code in any language other than shell scripting, to create a system that boots off a disk, copies the OS into RAM after booting, and then unmounts the disk, allowing it to be used during the copying to ram stage. In fact, I can think of two approaches:

1. Use the device mapper. At boot, the initramfs will use the device-mapper to create a mirror (RAID1) between an image file on the disk and a disk image stored in RAM. Then, once the system is loaded (or perhaps while it is loaded, particularly if it's a mulit-core system that can easily multi-task), the mirror is broken, and the on-disk file is removed from the mirror. (Note that the issue with the disk file can be solved by making a snapshot; we are really making a RAID1 setup with a snapshot of an on-disk readonly disk image and a in-memory disk image.)

2. Use btrfs. A btrfs filesystem is created using an on-disk image as a seed, and then adding an in-memory btrfs filesystem (again, this is done in the initramfs), then the seed block device is removed from the btrfs filesystem (which causes the data to automatically be moved to the in-memory device). (If the seed filesystem code turns out to have a bug, the same dm-snapshot trick mentioned above can be used to make the first filesystem writable.) This system has the advantage of allowing the in-memory filesystem to be grown at run-time just by creating a new block device and adding it to the filesystem (doing this for the above system would require some more device-mapper trickery and a filesystem resize tool), and it also allows for things like compression, but it also needs a newer kernel version to be reliable.

(Note that ZFS is not suitable for this purpose, as you can't remove a device from a filesystem after creating it.)

Of course, if all you want to do is run from RAM and don't mind waiting until the entire system is copied, there is a much simpler way of doing this, which some Linux distributions (Tiny Core comes to mind) actually use:

* Just put the entire system into the initramfs image. The kernel will unpack the initramfs image into RAM and execute /init as PID 1. In a typical Linux set-up, this init will just find the root filesystem, mount it, and switch to it, but with a full filesystem here (you might need to symlink /init to /sbin/init), this is unnecessary and the entire system can run from initramfs just fine (once it's unpacked, of course).

Edit: It appears that the trick I mentioned could also be done with bcachefs (using the dm-snapshot trick), but I noe that the filesystem in question is not yet in the mainline Linux kernel.

Both, get a large HDD for files that don't have to load fast (music, movies etc.) and get a smaller SSD for things like games that take a while to load (Divinity Original Sin 2 for example loads almost instantaneously for me, instantaneously as in 5 seconds :P).
You don't really have to put the OS on the SSD, it doesn't make that much of a difference.

Edit: And don't bother with an .M2 SSD unless you're into image editing.

I'd get a SSD. If they didn't cost several souls to buy!

Well, they don't now. You can get 120GB for $17 or 1000GB (1TB) for $110.

(Actually, the cheapest drives you can get these days are USB flash drives, which use solid-state storage, and some go for under $5.)

My m2 ssd is friggin great only cost 119 bucks! 256gb version of course Australians get ripped off!

If they're this cheap, I'd consider them for my next PC, but I doubt I'll find one at $17. And ideally for a new PC, I'd consider 256GBs instead of 120GBs.

Now laptop ones however, these are fun to watch the price gouging on.

EDIT: Also, if you're considering shipping or buying online from some international retailer, the prices for the shipping aren't kind.