Question Help me chose between HDD, M.2 or SSD

[Dawis67_AE]

Hi.
I reciently bought MSI GS65 and it comes with 250Gb of memory as standard. That size is ok for my collage needs, but since im also a gamer, i wish to expand my storage for games.

At first, obviously, i thought: M.2. It goes inside of the laptop, its small and very fast, but the only fast thing i have seen it do so far is deter me from acquiring it due to its high price point.

Then i thought, i would be fine with an HDD. I mean, i already own one, the Seagate Expandable 1TB drive, i might just get a second one or even better yet a Lacie thunderbolt 1TB drive. But that thought was discarded after inquiring that the latter drives thunderbolt feature is really just a fad that wouldnt increase the actual drive speed. I might not wana go with an HDD because uppon loading HDD "intensive" games like GTA V, with my current Seagate drive the loading times have been inadequately slow and once im ingame, if HDD is doing anything else besides handing out files to the game its bottlenecking it. That was also the reason for considering an HDD with TB connector. Back to the drawing board.

Then i thought, hmm, maybe external SSDs arent that expensive. That assumption was swiftly disregarded as the asking price of an expandable SSD is that of an M.2 drive.

But then i recalled that i had previously ordered a HDD with a Sata-to-USB cable in order to transfer windows from one of my older laptops to the newer ones. So i new idea came, why not make my own external SSD. The new Samsung QVO 1TB drive is the cost of the Lacie thunderbolt storage device, and a Sata-to-Thunderbolt 3 cable costs but a penny.

My question then is, is the latter option the best one? Have i missed any other, better, solution? Would an 2.5 SSD + Sata-TB3 cable work well as an external SSD?

Thanks

 

[mdd1963]

M.2 does not always mean faster, as the M.2 connection format supports both NVME and standard SATA drives...

You'd want to confirm which your laptop is capable of using, lest you choose an M.2 NVME and potentially have it not function at all in the case of the laptop only supporting SATA M.2...

The M.2 NVME drives are indeed much faster in benchmarks, boot up about 1-2 seconds quicker, but, gaming performance is largely unaffected, so, I'd put your money into a larger standard SATA SSD drive in 2.5" format, with a Corsair MX500 springing to mind as being a tad less expensive than an 860 EVO in 2.5" format...