As for picking out an M.2 drive:
SATA vs NVMe. SATA is the same connection speed as normal SATA III ports on the motherboard. An upper limit of about 550MB/s transfer rates. NVMe is a new protocol designed around Non Volatile Memory (Flash or other). Maximum bandwidth is basically as many PCIe lanes as you can throw at it, at least for now. Flash storage achieves its speed by massive parallelism, so there are still limits based on the number of flash chips and the controllers hooked up to them. Though there are drives with maximum speeds of 3000MB/s on the market already. Very difficult to achieve that speed outside of benchmark conditions though, so the average consumer will not need anything beyond SATA speeds.
Due to the parallelism, larger drives are usually faster up to a point.
SLC - one bit stored per NAND flash cell - Expensive, quite rare now, but durability is extreme
MLC - 2 bits stored per NAND flash cell - Still around, expensive, but not prohibitive. Great durability and great performance (These are your Samsung Pro drives)
TLC - 3 bits stored per NAND flash cell - This is now today's standard for cheaper SSDs. Durability is still okay, performance is down a little, however, the controllers will simulate SLC performance by only writing the top level bit, then going back when done and shuffling data into. MLC drives also do this. (These would be Samsungs's Evo drives)
QLC - 4 bits per NAND flash cell. This is fairly new stuff, only a few drives on the market. This should drive the price of flash storage per GB down a lot. Durability will be the worst of them, but should be adequate for normal consumer use.
Motherboard's maximum bandwidth can vary. Some will use PCIe 1x/2x/4x connections. So the very fast drives will need the 4x connections. ALso my understanding that on some higher end CPUs, the PCIe lanes are direct from the CPU. More commonly they come from the PCH (Chipset) so there is a limit on the total bandwidth the PCH can get to the CPU. So installing 2 or 3 drives of any type won't all be able to run at full speed at once. Usually not an issue though. These also usually share bandwidth with the available SATA ports, so as you install more NVMe or M.2 SATA drives you will lose access to the standard SATA ports. (High end motherboards would have more controllers/ports)
So all those factors taken into consideration. NVMe drives if you want pure performance. Most systems can handle one or two. Beyond that and you need to start placing them on PCIe cards and slotting them in that way.
M.2 SATA drives are good enough, and you reduce the number of wires in your system.
Due to their small size M.2 drives can suffer from thermal throttling when their controllers or flash chips get warm. Usually takes sustained reads/writes for that. So in some respects there are advantages to 2.5" SATA drives with the large metal casings screwed directly the chassis. Also usually at the front of the case where the intake fans can keep them cool.
Brands I would look at. WD which is essentially Toshiba/Sandisk SSDs. Samsung, Crucial, Kingston. There are only a few flash and controller manufacturers, so at a certain point they are all the same.
The drive you picked out is SATA, so not much different from a 2.5" SSD.
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