My made in China intel SSD in my Herobox died after 9 months. Either it just died or Windows was secretly doing an update and I restarted using only the power button. I don’t know whether I killed it doing that, or it was a natural death. I will definitely ensure that I set to not automatically update in the future; I don’t think that I had set that, but I will never know at this point.
The computer cannot see a drive there from which to boot. So I made a bootable Linux cinnamon for the first time on an 8 Gb usb flash (using my 2nd Herobox). That worked great. In 2 days I will have a WD M.2 2280 256 Gb to replace the original if it can still be used. It took a lot of opening to get to that. It does not seem to be designed for serviceability, but the build quality is great. The outer ring is metal. I had to remove nearly every screw possible to get to the SSD. I don’t know what it costs to ship from California to Hong Kong for warranty, but for this one, I will try to fix it.
The CPU, etc. is under a big metal shield/heat sink.
I will go with Linux for the first time and based on what I’ve seen in my trial from USB flash, I’m excited to dump Windows. I had never seen Linux before and I hope that it’s faster than MS.
I tried to not walk and touched ground often while working on it. If I killed it, I will buy an ESD mat for the next repair or build.
BTW, my computer never slowed the clock due to heat (I don’t let my house or electronics get hot), but the CPU on these spend much of their time at 100%; it’s the bottleneck. Still, these seem to be a great value and build. If they last.