SSD

good SSDs

Interactive SSD Form http://ssd.borecraft.com/

Personal Recommendations (all have DRAM caches unless specified as not having one):

SATA 2.5"
Team Group T-Force Vulcan (SM2258G a better S2258, TLC) (DDR4 DRAM cache?)
Crucial MX500 (SM2258, TLC)
Samsung 860 Evo (Samsung MJX, Samsung 312MB - 4GB LPDDR4, TLC)
TCSunbow X3(SM2258G, TLC) (Essentially an MX500 rebrand, dirt cheap, but no manufacturer warranty, you rely on amazon's warranty, and there are reports of new x3s coming with an SM2258XT controller instead)

NVMe M.2
WD SN550 (SanDisk 20-82-01008-A1, phat SLC cache but no DRAM cache, TLC) (Better than Crucial P1 by a ton)
HP EX950 (SM2262EN, Nanya or Micron DDR3, TLC)
HP EX920 (SM2262, Nanya DDR3, TLC)
Samsung 970 Evo Plus (Samsung Phoenix, Samsung 512MB - 2GB LPDDR4, MLC) (Would only recommend in very high end systems with money to burn or prosumer systems which REALLY need fast storage)
Silicon power A80
Sabrent Rocket
Corsair MP510
MP34
XPG 8200 PRO

Hynix Gold P31
Firecuda 520 (n/a)
Teamgroup L5 Lite (n/a)
SN750 (n/a)

These are all the same SSD under different names:
Phison E12/Toshiba 64L TLC rebrands
Sabrent Rocket
Inland Premium
Team Group MP34
Team Group Cardea Liquid
GIGABYTE Aorus RGB M.2
MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro
Corsair Force MP510
Silicon Power P34A80

ssd.borecraft.com/SSD_Buying_Guide.pdf

SSDs to avoid

Regarding SX8200 Pro:
The SSD is considered to be a russian roulette (it may or may not fail)
Problem is present in 1TB version of SX8200 Pro
Problem might also be affected with other sizes of the said SSD

tomshardware.com/news/adata-and-other-ssd-makers-swapping-parts
tomshardware.com/news/pny-xlr8-cs-3030-ssd-endurance-reduced-almost-80-percent
reddit.com/m03r1m
youtube.com/watch?v=K07sEM6y4Uc

Tools

Cloning
macrium.com/products/home
clonezilla.org

Resources

The NVMe vs SATA debate

This isn't really even a debate. Even if you want to spend easily 400+ on a top of the line SSD, the reasonable performance difference you're going to get for almost any task, be it video production, game load times, or even just booting windows is going to be negligible. If you have a use case for a drive that you KNOW (not think) can utilize sustaine 5gbps sequential reads, go right ahead. However, for most people, you're gonna have pretty much the same experience on a $400 Samsung NVMe drive as the $100 SATA WD Blue. NVMe doesn't make your drive any faster than a SATA one because your drives bottleneck is the driver's storage tech (mainly the NAND, but dram and controller speeds contribute somewhat), not the language your drive speaks to the rest of the computer in.
Should you get a SATA m.2 SSD?
It's worth noting that not all systems support SATA m.2 drives, so this could be a problem. More and more often, laptops are omitting the hardware required to support SATA m.2 drives. While it's not completely gone, it's likely to fall into obscurity in just a few short years. If you don't want to have to deal with adapters, going with an NVMe SSD that provides good performance at a fair price would be your best bet.

NAND flash types

In general, SLC > TLC > MLC > QLC. You should avoid buying a QLC drive whenever possible, as QLC has the worst endurance as well as the worst overall speeds. You'll often see high capacity QLC drives cheaper than an MLC or TLC drive of the same capacity for this reason. QLC drives often don't come with DRAM since QLC drives tend to be budget-oriented, so it's important to look out for that.

DRAM-less SSDs

There's little to no reason to purchase one of these SSDs. Not only do they perform significantly worse than a comparable SSD with dram, but it's often to the point where you might as well opt for a fast hard drive with a smaller, better SSD for booting from. In even a simple random 4k read, the MX500 (which costs roughly $120 for a terabyte of space) easily outperforms the highlighted SSD, which is the fasted dramless SSD anandtech had tested at the time. It's worth noting you could get similar performance to this MX500 for less, such as from a two-tone Blue/White WD Blue m.2 SSD, or a Sabrent Rocket depending on costs at any given time.

SSD