Wanted to post a little heads up mixed with a warning. I've been slightly delayed by a hardware failure two days ago which required reinstalling my OS. The warning is about what caused the failure: SSD drives.

I've been using an AData SSD as my root partition for slightly over an year. It's worked wonderfully up until this point, very fast and never had an issue. Then as I was installing the usual distro update, everything suddenly froze. I waited a minute then pressed the reset button, thinking it was just a glitch caused by libraries changing at runtime; Got a good scare once I noticed the machine was no longer booting... and by that I mean not even reaching the POST screen or doing the PC-speaker beep, just a black screen and nothing after being powered on! The mind boggling thing is that even after I unplugged all drives, it still wouldn't start, hence my worry that the new motherboard or CPU or RAM might have broken (I tested them afterward and they're fine since). My system only started working again after I removed one memory and reset the BIOS to its default settings; Never in my life have I seen a bad drive mess up the BIOS and require a CMOS reset! From there on the broken drive simply froze the boot process and could not be detected, I could confirm it's the culprit after getting the exact same results when plugging it into my mother's computer.

Today I went to the store to RMA as it's well within its warranty; Doubt I'll be seeing the money back, but even them sending a new one I can use elsewhere is better than nothing. After this episode I decided to order a Samsung 970 EVO despite its higher price range as I don't wish to repeat this experience ever again. I was lucky I still had my old 320 GB SATA2 HDD... it's slow as heck and sounds like a tractor when it's busy, but without it I don't know how I would have reinstalled the OS and been able to get back on track until the new SSD arrives.

So word of warning: If you buy any components especially an SSD, choose a trusted brand! Those drives are still very sensitive to periodic writing, even ones using 3D NAND which can allegedly tolerate hundreds of TB's of writes... mine went down precisely while the updates were being installed to the drive so it's pretty clear what happened.

Luckily that was just my root drive, no data of importance was lost. However I lost an entire day repairing my PC, this day delivering the broken drive back to the store, followed by a coming day to install my system on the new drive. Progress is being made though: I'm hoping to have something nice to post next month, as I have been working on yet more games and playing with ideas for a neat little engine.