I finished my first build a few months ago, put fedora workstation on it, everything's been great so far, but there are a few games I have and love which don't work, or are incredibly unstable. so I'm looking for a small, let's say 256gb SSD, to dual boot with windows for those games as well as creative work with lightroom.
My current drive has enough storage for a windows dual boot on its own, but I do not want windows to hide the linux partition or delete it completely.
It largely doesn’t make sense to get small SSDs at this point. 500 gig drives aren’t that much more than 250 gig drives. And not only do you get twice the storage, but usually better performance too.
Micro center has a 512 gig NVME SSD for $40, or $35 for a sata drive. A 256 gig drive is about $10 less at about $25 and $27. A 1tb NVME drive is $60. For a little over half the price you can get 4x the storage and have space for days.
That depends what games you plan to boot up. Are they the 100+GB Legendary Edition types with all the DLCs, or are they <15GB indies? If you think it could be the former now or in the future, I wouldn't get less than 512GB (also, keep in mind that games are only getting bigger). You'll run out of storage on the 256 faster than you think, either way, and if you're trying to save money, there's usually deep discounts around Christmas.
I always recommend Crucial drives, as they have been solid choices for me (I have an older MX100 that's still going strong 10 years later). What kind of interface do you have? SATA? NVME?