Make sure you dont get a gaming branded SSD. Its just fluff and priced higher than your regulat SSD with similar performance (unless you like RGB with your SSD)
What really matters for loading times are not the sequential speeds but the IOPS. If you ever explored games folders you’ll see that they’re made up of lots of small files. So, for example, older but more refined PCIe 3.0 drives will perform better.
That being said I’d buy a much cheaper but larger SATA SSD to store games in. I think that for those prices you could even get a 2TB drive.
I personally purchased this for my rig about a month ago
Its been great. Once PC gets past POST windows loads up in about 3 to 4 seconds.
I am using it on my AsRock B350 Pro4 with a 3700X as the boot drive.
Chose it mainly for its SLC nand.
I didn’t see a huge gain in game load times coming from an MX300, shaved a few seconds off if at best.
Was a definite improvement for obtaining more flash storage as my MX300 was getting close to full.
i think random 4k is what really matters, not sequential. also pcie 4 will technically be better because you should have one 4.0 lane. WD black is $135 as of writing this not sure how it fairs though.
also userbench is a handy website i use to compare shit. not sure if its 100% correct but results make sense.
Game loading is mostly cpu bound these days. You will notice almost no difference between NVME and sata at the moment. That may change in future but right now I can’t tell the difference. I have both in my rig.
They may benchmark different but games don’t care.
Treat NVME like you treated SATA SSD back then - use as a fast system/swap drive.
Treat SATA SSD like you treated hard drives. Bulk cheap game storage.
Spending big on NVME for games is wasted money until something changes (like the way the PS5 streams textures from NVME - but that isn’t happening yet and NVME will no doubt continue to fall in price in the interim).
That’s what I’m doing now, rig is all SSD - 1 TB NVME and 3 TB of SATA.
