If you can swing it, Sabrent makes some nvme enclosures for the 2230 size the deck uses https://sabrent.com/collections/nvme-enclosures/products/ec-ne30 that are super reasonable price wise, https://sabrent.com/collections/nvme-enclosures/products/ec-snveis for full size and is also super reasonable. What I did for mine and my partner’s decks upgrading from a 512 GB ssd, if you have drive space you could do with one enclosure. I use the old ssd as a removable drive now so it doesn’t got to waste.
Ssd is the way to go for sure, SD card is nice to have but it’s very noticeably slower for some things, I tend to use it for emulators and games I don’t play frequently.







I use both, debian on servers and old machines, arch on my desktop. Arch being rough is way overblown in my experience, the install script makes it straightforward to setup and it’s been pretty much painless since I switched to it two years ago, I had experience with debian before that. Both arch and debian have fantastic documentation available.
Debian and derivatives, in my experience, are really well supported so that’s a plus. Age of packages has never really bothered me and cases where I want bleeding edge there’s options for that.
Both are solid options and I don’t think you’ll be upset either way, if you can I’d try both.