NVMe enclosure are cheap, mine is a ugreen supporting usb 3.2 gen2 and i paid less than 20 euro. Put any kind of half decent nvme in it covered by one of those cheap heat dissipator.
Are there any enclosures that hold charge to prevent data corruption in an event of sudden removal?
https://www.dockcase.com/collections/ssd-enclosure
One thing to keep in mind is USB 3 ports often only output around 4.5 Watts, whereas some nvme m.2 drives want more than double that when writing. So it’s a good idea to choose a drive with lower active power requirements. The longer enclosures for dockcase have an extra usb-c port that more power can be supplied with
One thing I forgot warn about, while this applies to every drive with data you care about, have automated and tested backups. SSDs can and will just up and die, and most drives these days are going to be completely unrecoverable in practice unless the issue is solder ball corrosion/breakage.
Basically, be prepared for that 8TB of data to go poof, where it’s in an enclosure or not.
If your drive is suddenly missing, you might need to reboot, or remove the device to drain power and try again, or use a different USB port. Rarely, drives need to get power cycled to recover from power loss (I’ve not had to do with with my dockcase enclosure, but did a few times prior in earlier enclosures). See https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
Also stay away from cheap Samsung OEM drives on eBay, they have dogshit firmware that’s often been fucked with by whatever the vendor was, with no good way to get updates even if they exist. If your drive suddenly shows up as 1GB with the firmware version of “ERRORMOD” (“error mode”), it’s all gone.
I have a 10gbit/s enclosure and a 4TB gen4 nvme in it. It pains me to know that it could achieve >3GB/s write speeds but hindered by the interface.
It's key to get an enclosure with a chipset that will support whatever interface your computer actually provides, otherwise a lot of these enclosures will fall back to USB-3 speeds for compatibility and things will be slow. This site gives a pretty good overview of the chipsets out there and pros/cons of each one.
I've had good experiences with Acasis[1] enclosures - they seem have a lot of aluminum surface area for dissipating heat - but I get the feeling that a lot of these things are very similar in practice since they're just slapping the same chipsets into different boxes.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Enclosure-Aluminum-External-Support-C...
It was much cheaper to order the laptop with the smallest stock Dell NVME (512GB generic) and immediately upgrade it myself to a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro. The external enclosure made the upgrade much quicker and the savings more than paid for the enclosure plus I got a faster 4TB NVMe than the generic stock Dell NVME 4TB for less money.
Not small, but not huge either. More importantly, it gets about 3/4GB/s with a Kingston NV3 4TB drive and very acceptable temps.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQZ6SYD1
No tools to insert m.2 nvme stick, easily fits and locks into a pcie slot, without a metal bracket to unscrew/remove.
I don't have a pcie gen 5 system, but the new samsung drives might do 14,800 MB/s
I also love thin ethernet patch cables. and 5-in-1 usb cables for travel.
It's obviously limited by Thunderbolt 2 transfer rates, but it's still faster than both the sluggish factory SSD and the SSD RAID, consisting of 4 Samsung 850 Pros in an 8-drive Areca SAS enclosure that also contains 4 2 TB HGST Ultrastars that are somehow still running without a single uncorrectable error after more than 13 years of 24/7 operation in a dusty apartment with questionable climate control.
At this point, my money's on both the enclosure and at least two SSDs failing before any of the hard drives.
I'd say they don't make 'em like they used to, but since I've yet to see a failure or uncorrectable error on any of my newer 8 TB and 16 TB Ultrastars either, I lack data to support this conclusion.