Given your use case, I'd go for size over speed. I did music production for a few years using HDDs to store my samples and VSTs, and I never had any major issues. Storage prices stagnated for a while, but they're finally coming down more steadily, so you might consider picking up HDDs for now and holding out for an SSD upgrade down the road.
Data Hoarder
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
EDIT: was thinking Firecuda as they are SMR rather than the CMR barracuda, so read that SMR drivers are considered to be better.
read again
My bad, I've mixed them up, thanks for mentioning that
I would go for SSDs if I needed speed. SSDs longevity is just fine. Any drive can die when you leave it unused for a decade.
I did in the end, a 1tb WD Black gaming nvme for £60 and something I was dumbfounded by, a 4tb WD black PCIe ssd I had to Google it because I was so shocked, sold and fulfilled by Amazon US, so I'd have to import it but it was £136 pounds, Google telling me it's £800 to £1000, amazon has since said that the item is unavailable and the 1tb has now gone on sale.