There's nothing wrong with buying a premade SSD external drive to handle your data backups or maintain a portable media collection, and for most people that's exactly what I'd recommend doing.

However, there are more dedicated techies out there who prefer to roll their own solutions, and if you'd like to join them, you'll no doubt find yourself looking at SSD enclosures like this one. This allows you to take an NVMe or SATA SSD, which would normally be used as an internal computer drive, and turn it into a portable backup device instead.

UGREEN’s 20Gbps M.2 SSD Enclosure is a shockproof silicone-and-aluminum case that works with the most common sizes of M.2 SSDs (2230, 2242, 2260, and 2280) that can have up to 8TB of storage, and it offers blazing fast 20Gb/s transfer speeds for NVME drives (or 6Gb/s for SATA) via a built-in USB-C Gen 2x2 port.

The case also features a heat-dissipating thermal pad that keeps the inner drive from overheating during those fast data transfers, so your data stays safe and everything runs smooth like butter.

As I write this on August 21st, 2024, the enclosure is on sale for $30 on Amazon (down from $40). They also have a 10Gbps version for $23.