So, before I find a SDD to buy, what are some things I should look for
it to have and what are things I should avoid?
I think the single most important thing is buying stuff from a reputable
brand (there's quite a number of those by now). Look at reviews.
Top-tier performance probably isn't going to matter much for daily use,
but I'd still look for a drive with a good warranty and a high write
endurance rating, even if it commands a premium.
Avoid drives based on QLC flash (they still have reliability and
performance issues, and frankly prices aren't that great either).
Most NVMe drives can only be booted from in UEFI mode (*), so if for any
reason you still need to boot from an SSD in legacy BIOS mode -- stay
safe and go for SATA or be sure to buy from a place with a good return
policy.
(*) boot-time NVMe access relies on a boot ROM carried on the drive, and
most (all?) drives only have a UEFI ROM. While some UEFI firmwares claim
to have a "universal NVMe driver", my experience with those has not been
good.
While at it, if I look for a NAS type HDD, would all those be PMR
instead of SMR?
I would expect any SMR drives sold at retail (i.e. not in USB boxes or
the like) to be clearly marked as such, since they are a niche product
with abysmal performance on common workloads.
You're not going to silently get SMR drives in a NAS product line.
From my understanding that should be correct. Mostly I
buy WD, Seagate and Samsung. I've had a WD fail, I've had a Seagate
fail. I'm not looking for a HDD flame up. O_o I'm starting to look at
HGST. I think I got the spelling correct. Never had one tho.
While Seagate seems to be the current leader in selling crap, I've had
all kind of drives die on me. Most notable are a couple of high-end WDs
literally going up in smoke some years ago, and an HGST going belly up
with a good impression of a machine gun just the other day.
In general I've had good luck with 3TB HGST and Toshiba drives, though
the Toshibas I have are really HGST drives rebranded following a round
of company mergers and subsequent antitrust-driven spinoffs.
WD Enterprise drives are quite good, but they do command a sizable premium.
I've not had any experience with "NAS" drives, nor with modern
helium-filled high-capacity drives. Apart from the unit price, I don't
need that much space and I'm not particularly keen on having that much
data go poof if a single device decides to stop working.
andrea
