What you give up with a cheaper NVMe drive
Less than you might think. For booting Windows, opening apps and loading games, a budget PCIe 4.0 drive feels almost identical to a flagship. The differences show up in sustained workloads: copying very large files, video editing or filling most of the drive, where cheaper drives can slow down once their fast cache fills up.
If your work is mostly everyday computing and gaming, a budget drive is the right buy. If you regularly move tens of gigabytes at a time, a drive with a higher endurance rating and more consistent sustained writes is worth the step up.
PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0 on a budget?
PCIe 4.0 drives now cost little more than PCIe 3.0, so choose PCIe 4.0 if your system supports it. The Samsung 980 is a PCIe 3.0 drive rated at 3,500 MB/s, which still makes sense for older laptops and desktops that only have PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots, where a faster drive would be limited to the same speed anyway.
For a newer system, PCIe 4.0 drives such as the SK hynix Platinum P41 and Crucial P310 read at 7,000 MB/s or more.
Check endurance and warranty
Endurance is rated in TBW (terabytes written), the amount of data the maker guarantees you can write over the drive's life. Among the 1TB drives here, the Samsung 980 is rated at 600 TBW, the SK hynix P41 at 750 TBW, the Kingston Fury Renegade at 1,000 TBW and the Seagate FireCuda 530 at 1,275 TBW. For a typical home user any of these lasts many years; the higher ratings matter if you write large amounts of data every day.
All of the drives above carry a five-year warranty, which is the standard to look for at any price.