P310

The CS1030 often uses QLC flash, which has low durability and becomes noticeably slower after a few years, so it should not be used as the OS drive. Get a better drive with TLC flash like the Patriot P310 or Samsung 980.

You did not mention an SSD model, so here are some good choices (Gen3/Gen4 makes no difference in practice): PCPartPicker Part List Type Item Price Storage Patriot P310 480 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive $74.99 @ Amazon Storage Samsung 980 500 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State

The P34A60 is likely to use QLC flash, which has low durability and becomes noticeably slower after a few years. A better drive with TLC flash would be, e.g., the Patriot P310 or FanXiang S500 Pro.

The problem is.... The P410 uses QLC flash, which indeed becomes slow when the cache has filled. The OS should be installed on an SSD with TLC cache, e.g., Patriot P400 Lite, Patriot P310, Patriot P320, or Timetec 35TTFP6PCIE. (The P410 is fine as secondary storage for files and games.)

The lower speed of external drives might be measurable, but is probably not noticeable in games. An NVMe drive is much faster than SATA at a better price. Consider the Patriot P310, WD Blue SN580, or Lexar NM620 (all 1 TB, on Amazon).

A SATA drive used for the OS should have DRAM cache. Consider the WD Red SA500, Transcend SSD230S, Kingston KC600, or Samsung 870 EVO (nothing below £70). If at all possible, put the OS on an NVMe drive (even a cheap drive like the Patriot P310 is faster than any SATA drive, especially for the many