As someone else has pointed out, it really depends on your use case. Although I personally keep my drives (SSD & HDD) in a redundant RAID configuration as my data is largely mission-critical.

You could do your programming theoretically on any laptop, although I’d say faster the better/easier it’ll be for you in the long run. In regard to your comment on upgradability I’d recommend taking a look at a Framework laptop where their whole goal is repairability which comes with the added benefit of being upgradable.

I wonder if someone has already created a bot that asks chat-GPT to create a piece of code, grabs it to try and run it, and then just goes back and forth with chat-GPT to fix the errors. Now the code would probably be a complete mess, but I wonder if non-coders could use it to create helpful one-off tools they can’t find anywhere else.