I'm looking for validation (or otherwise) on changing my boot drive in my Acer Predator (PO3-620) I bought in 2021 with a 500gb M.2 nvme (and 2x1TB HDDs for personal/work/games) for 1TB or TB boot drive. I go through the shopping process every 6 months or so, but then I forget everything I found such as which gen to buy, which gen the MB actually is, whether to clone or start fresh without losing the data on the HDDs, etc.
For a while, 500GB been enough for my OS, main programs, and main game (Destiny 2). I started running into trouble last year with wanting to play Avatar: FOP, which ran like total *** on my 'gaming' HDD, and the boot drive barely has any room for it even after moving gaming clips and screenshots over to the other drives. My guess is games just aren't made to run on HDDs anymore. Of course I'd want to change out my HDDs for SSDs too, but that's an issue for another day, maybe a wider PC upgrade into a new case, motherboard, Theseus' ship kind of thing, since there's only room for the one M.2 to my knowledge. This is generally where I stop researching due to indecision…
But being budget conscious, I am not sure whether to go for newer gen (4, God forbid 5) for higher speeds even though I'm pretty sure the actual read/write speeds will be maxed out to gen 3 numbers of thanks to the MB (need confirmation on this). I want it to be as seamless as possible and for the data on the installed HDDs, at the very least, to be untouched/uncorrupted.
[Edited the topic title to include the topic issue.]
