small SSD recomendations for black friday?

Hello, after seeing the (stupid) trend of games having SSD listed as requirement, allegedly bc devs got lazier and decided to optimize them less and less, I have been thinking about getting a external SSD for playing games just in case while they are cheaper.

I acquired a Crucial 1TB SSD around 4 years ago and it worked fine; but I didn't use it much farther than managing a 1 TB library of installed mods for Skyrim for 1-2 years. I didn't have much problem with it, except that in some circumstances I think it "stopped responding" while transferring data. I never knew why; but it almost always happened when I took it with me to my workplace to leave it doing processes that take hours while I was working. At home it was fine.

So now I am considering the Crucial 2TB disks which are under 100$ in Amazon. I have read mixed things recently about Sandisk SSDs, so I am unsure if I should trust them.

For HDDs, I have always used WD disks and so far, none of them has broken. One of my disks even has a SMART usage time higher than 3 years plugged to my computer; but Idk how good their SSDs are.

Do you have any view or recommendation about SSD models/manufacturers?

Thanks in advance.

BTW, long ago I read that after failure, SSD data is usually not as recoverable as with HDDs. So I always keep a copy of the SSD content in a HDD. Is that true? Or I am being paranoid?