If you’re only getting around 35-37 on avg I doubt a gen 4 nvme will chance that if any.

What games and you storing. Something a little newer(relative something made 2020 onwards should be around 128mb of cache)Larger HDD with 128mb of cache will do the job. Unless the fastest game launch times matter a HDD is still reasonable to play on. Any games that load most of the game assets upfront will be fine after you wait out the launch and boot time, turn based games, single player games are okay for the most part unless it’s asset heavy, small games will be fine too. Open world games, many of the modern fps games, heavy modding games, or any game that needs to reference the drive it’s on will definitely work better on a SSD

Imma make some assumptions here. For total storage your probably what? Around 2tb total? 1tb gen 3 nvme and a 1 tb SATA ssd(I assume 2.5 inch, not the SATA M.2 like you said) If you’re getting something like the 1tb Crucial P5 Plus probably runs you around $60-80, you can get a decent 2-4tb Seagate 7200 rpm pretty much for the same price if not cheaper(let’s say gen 4 nvme boot times for a game are around 3-8 seconds and on the 7200 rpm HDD it’s around 25-35 seconds, Don’t quote me just an educated enough to be dangerous guess. Probably get closer to 4tb for the same price you could save even more doing an WD Blue 5400rpm(but the cost it’s probably not worth the boot and load times). Thought big difference is, as a HDD fills up it gets slower while a SSD doesn’t get slower as it fills up

Maybe you weren’t expecting this but here’s a quick and easy way to understand why the more a HDD is filled the “slower”. A empty 1tb HDD will write data on the outer edges of the disk that spins and moves inward as it fills up. Imagine this

On a 1TB HDD, data is written from the outer edge (fastest) to the inner edge (slowest). So: • You install Game 1 (500GB) → it gets stored on the outer tracks = faster loading • Then you install Game 2 (next 500GB) → it goes on the inner tracks = slower loading This is based off angular momentum. Draw a line from the center of a circle to the edge, now rotate the circle 90° and now measure the distance from the marked edge of the circle to where it used to be. That distance will be much greater that the marked center edge(technically it didn’t really move it it’s dead center) the platter(disk Iv been calling it) spins at 7200 rpm on a 7200 rpm regardless of what’s going on. Data on the inner edge of the disk takes longer to load literally before it takes longer to read the same amount of data. If you delete Game 1, Game 2 doesn’t move—it stays on the slow inner tracks. So Game 2 won’t suddenly get faster unless you reinstall it or run a defrag tool that physically moves the files.(while a ssd doesn’t care where the game is as long as it knows where it is. Oh is game files 2,3,4 in this part of the chip? Great we need those 3 files. So yeah a defrag will try to move the most used files to the edge of the disk, but the date the files were installed also matters, since game one was installed before game two game one had all its data written on the outside of the disk where. If my grammar is bad, doesn’t make sense, or sm it’s almost 2 in the morning and I can’t sleep, take it all with a grain of salt