💬 Old hard drive is killing my game loading, which SSD should I buy?

My gaming PC still runs everything off a mechanical hard drive. It's slow enough to make me angry. I start the PC and go make tea. By the time I'm back, it's still loading the desktop. Games take 2 or 3 minutes to load a level. My friends have already respawned by the time I'm in. I've decided to buy an SSD, but money is tight, so I want to spend it properly. I want something between 500GB and 1TB. SATA is cheaper per GB, but NVMe is supposed to be faster. I read that for games the difference between them is smaller than the benchmark numbers suggest. I don't know if that's true in real life. Anyone who has used both can tell me. I don't want to spend extra on speed that I won't be able to feel while playing. There's another question. Should I get 1 big drive for Windows and games together? Or a smaller fast one for Windows and the games I play most, and keep the old drive for movies? My old drive has about 400GB of stuff I don't open much. I'd hate to move all of it. I keep going back and forth and I've been on this for 3 days. I'd like real model names, please, not just brands. It's easier to compare in shops and online. Also the warranty. I noticed it varies a lot between brands for what looks like the same thing. Which brands would you avoid? I don't want to buy a cheap drive that dies in 8 months. I'll post an update after I buy one and test the load times. Promise.

Would lean NVMe if your motherboard supports it, the price difference has shrunk a lot compared to a couple of years back. WD Black and Samsung's budget NVMe lines have both held up well for me across two different builds now. Splitting OS plus a few games onto the SSD and keeping everything else on the old mechanical drive worked out well for storage.

Went with a Crucial SATA drive for my last build purely on budget, boot times improved massively over the old mechanical drive even without going NVMe at all. For gaming the load time difference between SATA and NVMe was barely noticeable in my own experience, mostly mattered for large file transfers rather than actual game loading screens during normal play sessions each day.