What is Reddit's opinion of Kingston A400 120G Internal SSD M.2 2280 SA400M8/120G - Increase Performance?

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No, it's pretty accurate. You're conflating the move to ZFS boot in 9.3 with "oh noes, usb dies!"

Take a look at your reporting data. I guarantee you that unless you're doing something weird or unusual, you are not doing much io to boot. For example, over the past 24 hours, I've written 64.28KB to my boot drives. Mine happen to be a couple of these in USB enclosures. They're rated at 40TBW. Let's be generous and say I average 1MB/day (which is 16x my actual usage), those drives will last somewhere around 100k years before they suffer total write death. Even if USB flash is 1000x worse, we're still talking a lifespan of over 100 years.

> Additionally many USB3 keys fail faster due to increased heat.

This is more likely, but you can plug a USB3 drive into a USB2 port and not overheat.

It's nothing special, but since the case requires an B or B+M keyed M.2 SSD I got this one.

I put a 500GB WD Blue in my 7 year old ASUS Q550LF and it brought it right back up to speed. Though unfortunately it is on the pricier side of things.

Recently got a Kingston 480GB for my new PC build, and it was great value for money. There's a 120GB version that can be found here for just $20.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

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To prefix; If your'e buying new I highly recommend you save at least $900. I advise you consider the following.

1. Your CPU is the Ryzen 3 2200G. The 2200G provides Vega 8 integrated graphics. Vega 8 does provide a playable experience. If you're interested Vega 8 could provide FPS upwards of 60 in Apex Legends at 720p on lowest graphics and possibly a playable 30 FPS 1080p experience. You'd be better off purchasing a secondhand GPU instead of relying on the Vega 8 of the 2200G as you can't purchase a new GPU at this budget that's better than Vega 8. I've seen second hand RX 570 and RX 580 for approximately $100 Australian. The RX 570 is approximately <em>350%</em> better than Vega 8 whereas the is approximately <em>420%</em> better than the Vega 8 and 16% better than the 570. Either of these GPU's is the best second hand option for any budget build, don't consider any second hand NVIDIA cards as they're usually overpriced in comparison the the 570 and 580 secondhand. Purchasing a secondhand GPU is your best option for performance and could be purchased after you've purchased your 2200G.
2. Cheapest motherboard supporting the IGPU of the 2200G plus provides an option to overclock the 2200G. You won't find a motherboard better than the B450M-HDV at the price point. A B450 will also support all Zen CPUs if you're looking to upgrade and the upcoming Zen 2 CPUs after an update to the BIOS. An upgrade to a secondhand 2600 once Zen 2 releases and people replace and resell their 2600's would be a recommendation.
3. The memory I've listed is 2 x 4 at 3000Hz. Although if you wanted to upgrade to 16GB you'd have to completely replace the RAM due to the Motherboard only having 2 DIMS. Potentially save and purchase a 2 x 8 kit for approximately $110 - $120. It's difficult to purchase secondhand DDR4 memory in Australia, or at least that's my experience. Whatever you do don't purchase 1 x 8 kit if you don't plan to purchase a 2nd sometime within the foreseeable future as you'll impact the performance of your System dramatically with single channel (1 stick) of ram.
4. Cheapest 120GB SSD for your operating system. Amazon lists the <em>240GB M.2</em> version for $1 more; assuming it's legitimate it's a steal.
5. Cheap reputable 1TB Hard Drive. You could get a 2TB Hard Drives instead for an extra $20 - $25.
6. I wouldn't recommend this case, it's simply the cheapest on PCPP. For an Extra $25 you could purchase the Cougar <em>MX330</em> a superior budget case. Alternatively Corsair offers cheaper $60 to $70 cases and the Phanteks <em>P300</em> for $90 is the king of $100< cases.
7. Cheapest PSU with a reputable brand. Although it's important to purchase a PSU that would prevent any type of possible electrical damage to the rest of the system. I'm uncertain as to whether this particular model of PSU would provide the necessary protection.
8. Unfortunately due to the Budget I had to select one of the cheapest Monitors. I would recommend you spent at least $200 AUD on a Monitor rather than $100 as you'll get a SIGNIFICANTLY better product for the price.
9. Finally I found a cheap Gaming Keyboard and Mouse combo on Mwave. I can not speak for the quality of the products. You'll have to rely on cheaper bundles for Peripherals such as the Keyboard and Mouse at this price range or purchase higher quality peripherals second hand.

My advice would be to both research the secondhand market and continue saving in the meantime. You'll be able to purchase any secondhand components or peripherals while you're saving. If you're desperate to purchase a system immediately a System based on the 2200G would be somewhat sufficient although within the $600 price range you're cutting corners. I would wait until you're able to purchase at least a better monitor.

If you're interested in informing yourself about the secondhand market I recommend Australian YouTuber <em>Tech YES City</em> He's pretty entertaining, Australian and deals with the secondhand market.

If it's just as a boot drive, any will be fine but err on the size of something larger (100GB+) just because bigger = higher TBW (but also, the amount that TrueNAS writes will have boot SSDs lasting decades). I wouldn't even waste SATA ports on them. I use two of these plugged into M.2 SATA USB enclosures (make sure you match the interface -- these kinds of enclosures generally only support one of SATA or NVME). They work great as mirrored USB boot drives, but with higher quality flash that will outlast everything else in my build. 120GB is rated at 40TBW, but I write mere megabytes to the disk over a six month period; I don't imagine I write even 1TB/year at my current rate).

That discussion is mostly bogus. Maybe the "syslog on OS drive" is legit, but it's trivial to move that to your system dataset instead (in Scale, it's a checkbox in System Settings -> Advanced -> Syslog Configure, "Use System Dataset"; make sure you move that off of boot-pool in System Settings -> Advanced -> System Dataset Pool Configure). With my syslog on my spinning disks, my boot pool has written maybe 1-2MB over the course of an entire day. That's not nearly enough to kill even the worst USB flash.

Also, if you're going to buy SSD, don't buy 16GB. That's silly. USB TBW life is based on size, and there's really no value in buying anything < 120GB.

Finally, it's worth differentiating between "USB Flash" and "USB as a communication protocol". SSDs in USB enclosures are great.

$30x2 for 120GB m.2 SATA SSDs + $20x2 for a decent set of USB enclosures = $100 for a very robust boot setup that doesn't waste precious SATA ports.

Driver 465.31 works for me on the newly released RebTech.

Side note that may be of value: The best thing I did was move to an m.2 hard drive on the new RebTech. Way fewer issues than with SD card or USB for me. Which RebTech board do you have?

The m.2 I used is this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07P22T3VD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1

No. It's fine. The devs no longer recommend USB flash because SSD flash is much cheaper than it used to be. USB flash will be fine, especially if you use 2.0 (3.0 may have a heat problem) and use two to create a mirror.

Alternatively, SSD over USB works great, too. Get two of these ($60) and two of these ($26) and you'll have an SSD-based mirrored USB boot configuration for < $100.

SATA is available in M.2 as well, and works quite well. (Cheap SSD + USB enclosure) x 2 = a redundant boot setup on SSD flash (to avoid USB3 flash's heat death issues, not the myth of USB flash IO write death) without wasting any internal connections that could be better used for data drives.

Will this work? Kingston A400 SSD Internal Solid State Drive M.2 2280 SATA Rev 3.0, 120GB - SA400M8/120G https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P22T3VD/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_X0591YERTCKSKYW1BSJ3?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1

Something's messed up there.

I put two of these into two of these, resilvered from my old USB Flash drives to my new USB SSD drives, and everything has been perfect since.

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Your motherboard has an m.2 slot, which is probably exactly what you're looking for. Here is a cheap 120 Gb m.2 SSD and here is a video demonstrating how to install it, to give you an idea of what it will look like on your board.

There are some m.2 ssds that you can get for cheap.

Here’s one I found https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P22T3VD/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_imm_t1_tkUPFbCE6P8Q3

>The very same article states that the "...numbers are only going to keep growing – and it won’t be long before digital purchases account for the majority of software sales".

One thing are numbers, other are expectations. No one said digital sales weren't increasing over physical, I was just pointing out how your argument that "Physical distribution is dead" was just wrong.

>You call it abstract but just look the help forums and see how often even system updates that go through several beta stages cause problems or bricks. And now you have deal with this for each and every update on every game?!

I really do not understand your point. As a matter of fact, last time I've checked, software releases also go through beta stages and can cause problems or bricks. Unless you are suggesting firmware version on the cartridges (which isn't by far a requirement) I do not see how this proves as an disadvantage. Install a digital game in your SSD. Now imagine the same game installed in an SSD, but this is external instead of internal storage. What is the catch, really?

>That is not how storeMI/Optane works. Your console wouldn't swap out the full size game into the cache.

Does NBA2K19 needs 31.5GB of storage to run in the Nintendo Switch, plus 5GB of internal memory? How many games on PlayStation 4 do you know that have the ability to play the first few hours of the game without downloading the full package? 15% of the games? 10%? There is a very big difference between what is achievable and how developers handle those possibilities against the investment of time and effort. At the worst case scenario, the full game needs to be loaded to the SSD, and this is how we should approach the problem when we speak about it, instead of believing that developers will actually put effort towards development of a feature that is only usable in the console space out of their good-will, and completely unusable on PC landscape.

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Storage space is a non issue in the future, no disagreement there. As for today, or a console on shelves next year, I am not so sure. When it comes to physical media, there are three options, which I present by decreasing probability (according to my beliefs): physical media is extinct, flash memory becomes the new standard for physical media; a new disc format with higher storage capacity (and ideally better reading speeds) is released.

I seriously can't understand your accounting. Here's a link to a two double-layered BD sized SDD on amazon. 20 US$. Currently discounted to 17 US$ :D.

Kingston A400 120G Internal SSD M.2 2280 SA400M8/120G - Increase Performance https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P22T3VD/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_LpQDFbGAJQBKE

Worth noting your need a $5-10 USB 3.0 to M.2 SATA enclosure