Should I upgrade my standard 2.5” SSD to a M.2?

[Basshunter]

Will I get any significant improvement in speed when opening/using 3ds Max or Windows 11 in general?

[Juraj]

Disclaimer: 2.5" and m.2 are form-factors, and both can be in fact either SATA (older, slower) or NVMe (using PCIe lanes).
So I presume you mean m.2 NVMe drive. Just in case, because I had plenty of SATA m.2 few years ago.

For speed: None at all for Open/Using 3dsMax, that is purely down to 3dsMax.
Windows 11 in general, yes, little bit. But you will hardly perceive it, people who claim otherwise, are deeply in Placebo territory :- ).
I am using Optane system drive, which are further 10 times faster with random access reading of small files and it still doesn't make any perceptible difference anywhere I could feel it.

I would not swap existing drives if you're ok with their capacity. But going forward, I would suggest buying exclusively NVMe based one since the price difference is very small already and they have much higher compatibility (directly on motherboard, in extension PCIe cards,etc..).

[Basshunter]

Hey Juraj! It's always good to hear your opinion.

So I guess I'm keeping my Samsung SSD 860 EVO for now.

It's such a shame that we still have those problems with 3ds Max. Hope they fix that one day.

[Juraj]

By fixing one day you mean rewriting the whole core :- ) ? I think they gave up on that long time ago (when the codename Excalibur or how they called it failed) and might not have team size to do more than incremental changes.
I think Mudbox for example didn't even get a single feature in 3 years (they just upgrade the naming year). Rather fascinating, but I would wager than Blender might have more developers by quite some margin at this point.

So I guess I'm keeping my Samsung SSD 860 EVO for now.

Absolutely, keep it until it dies, which may be very long time away (or never). And even when you no longer need it in workstation, you can quickly make it into external harddrive which is what I do and keep for backup or travelling.
But make sure you keep latest firmware. If you don't have already, install Samsung Magician and have it check for firmware and general health.

[James Vella]

If you don't have already, install Samsung Magician and have it check for firmware and general health.

Ah thanks Juraj! I didnt know about this software.

[Juraj]

For Samsung it's somewhat more important than others :- ) It started with my 840 EVO which came out 8 years ago I think and it would slow down to like 10 perc. of speed until Firmware came out to "fix" it. (The "Fix" was full 0/1 clean rewrite of every byte every few months, shortening the life of the drive by doing that). By the way this drive (840 Evo 2TB, I have two of them) still lives. Outside of some Crucial MX 10 years ago, I never had another SSD die on me. They are pretty much immortal if they don't have underlying issues (which sadly Samsung seem to  have pretty often...)

And the recent 980 Pro (2TB version) & 990 Pro (all versions) just dying after few weeks.. well. The firmware this time seems to have fixed the issues but not existing damage already done (so it only works for those that still live).