Okay. So I think I have my plans for the hard drive complete. Now here's the shedpainty question:

The old drive has Ubuntu 24.04 on it. I hate it.

Should I trade down to Debian?

Or should I trade up to Pop!_OS?

Will I regret either of these? Will either one, if I just go get a standard usb key installation, cause driver problems with my AMD chipset or secure boot or whatever other junk Lenovo has on board?

@mcc it does make a difference.

These days not so much on the performance front, most generations of SSDs are roughly comparable to each other under normal workloads; but reliability differs a lot, and thermal performance does a bit.

(Non-standard workloads are things like sustained max-throughput writes which exhaust DRAM caches, or heavy load when drives are near 100% usage and can't relocate storage blocks quickly enough to meet write load.)

https://mastodon.social/@gnomon/113720701898590025

@mcc If you're looking for speed, choose WD SN850X (Samsung used to be good, too, but I've heard that their recent models have some problems). Otherwise just pick any drive that has 5-year warranty.

Note: if you're planning to do a lot of writing, avoid QLC drives – write speed on those drives falls below 30 MB/s once you fill the SLC cache.

@mcc Personally, I stick with drives manufactured by the companies which make their own flash: Intel (Solidigm), Kioxia (Toshiba), Micron (Crucial), Samsung, SK Hynix, and Western Digital (SanDisk).

There’s some difference between vendors, mostly in the controller firmware. This mostly matters in “enterprise” drives rather than consumer drives.

The much bigger difference is whether the drive has DRAM cache or not. In general, drives with DRAM have much higher random I/O performance than drives without it, and random performance equates to perceived “snappiness”.

@mcc from low-volume personal experience ADATA SSDs are absolute garbage and the only ones to just randomly die on me.

WD, Samsung, Crucial are probably a safe bet. "Lexar" is now a "brand" so yeah probably not.

Edit: generally the cheapest branded option is probably fine. If you care about longevity you could look into SLC/TLC/QLC and stuff but meh. Everything that's not Adata seems to be doing fine.

(why yes I do have a grudge against garbage manufacturers)

@mcc as someone who worked in a family-owned computer store last summer, there's some differences. Samsung has definitely fallen off on quality control over the last 6 or so years. WD blue is usually what we stocked and sold, because it was usually the cheapest. We also sold crucial, because their reputation over the decades is a bit better. The speed and reliability differences are generally imperceptible between brands. The only thing I make sure people know is that once a drive starts to have trouble, you need to replace it as soon as possible, because you dont know whether it'll last 6 more months or completely fail and delete all your data later today. Drive failures were by far our biggest hardware issue amongst all categories of customers.

Tldr: dont buy samsung, otherwise it doesn't really matter, just check your drive health and replace as soon as there's any signs of potential failure.