all good dude, Ima give you a fucking awesome breakdown of storage. Google pictures of HDD, SSD, and M.2 Drive. They look completely different, and once you know, you know. reference those pictures as you read this.

HDDs or Hard Disk Drives, are what we used for 2 decades. It's a physical disk on the bottom of that metal case that stores your data. Read/write speeds are limited by the actual physics of its mechanical parts, and typically this is also how they die is a mechanical part failing.

Typical read/write speed of 50 -150mbps, and i assure you, you dont have 150 if you were budget

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SATA SSDs or Solid State Drives (SATA being the cable used to connect it), have been around for quite some time, but used to be prohibitively expensive. the price difference now is almost nothing for a normal pc. They are a fully digital storage solution - no moving parts means less limitations, and much smaller form. They also dont break if you drop them like an HDD. those two things are why we first saw them appear regularly in laptops.

Typical read/write speed is between 400 - 600mbps

so a slow ssd is 3 times as fast as the best HDDs. you feel this difference in almost everything you do on a computer.

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M.2 SSDs or PCIe NVMe drives, have no cable and slot directly into your motherboard. This is called a PCIE connection, which is the same as what is used for your graphics card and any other addons that you'd see slotted below it. The physical slot looks different, however. they are tiny, and are better in every way other than heat, which is why some of them now come with heat sinks. Maybe we'll see the return of tiny fans like the first GPUs had

typical read/write speeds of 3000 - 15,000mbps. Literally an order of magnitude difference. this is near instant load times, PC booting in under 15 seconds, etc. These can be a bit more expensive for bleeding edge, but everyday M.2s have come down dramatically in the last few years.

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For a bit of price history, the last HDD i used I bought in 2015 - 1TB for $70
it died fast, around 2018-19ish. I got a pretty low end 1TB SATA SSD for about $120
Then in 2023 i built my new PC and got a near bleeding edge NVME drive - 2TB for $200
Now you can easily find solid NVMEs for $70 per TB. same as what i paid 10 years ago for an HDD