If you’re buying a portable SSD, whether it’s for your general day-to-day or heading back to college, the convenient option is just to pick up one from a reliable brand. But hold up! What if I told you that there was an option that is cheaper and better? Sounds like a stretch, but let me explain.
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One of the biggest problems I’ve faced in portable SSDs is that when it fails, you just have a dead drive. Don’t get me wrong, with around a 5-year lifecycle in my experience, they are a lot more durable than your standard hard disk drive, but you can’t help but feel your money evaporate when it decides to give up the ghost.
Well, that’s where I introduce you to the secret budget SSD hack that companies like SanDisk and Crucial don’t want you to know about — just get an NVMe drive and an SSD enclosure. It operates the same, has decent speeds, is actually repairable and upgradeable, and is cheaper.
Doing the math
So in total, the enclosure and 2TB SSD here come in at just shy of $126 ($130 if the Ugreen enclosure wasn’t discounted). That is at least $20 cheaper than the cheapest 2TB portable SSD I can find, and up to $180 cheaper than the good ones you’d actually buy.
But what’s the catch? This job has taught me to be a little bit suspicious when it comes to money saving — it can usually lead to finding out where a corner has been cut. And honestly, while there is a small drop in speed (more on that later), this solution doesn’t impact general performance needs — especially given how much cash you’re saving at the checkout.
Setting it up
I had my Philips screwdriver ready to go. As a PC builder, I’ve become accustomed to having to deal with a screw or two when it comes to SSDs. So imagine my surprise when this SSD enclosure is completely tool-free!
Just push out the inner casing, pull out the rubberized pin that holds it down, stick the drive in and push it down in the correct hole. You’ve got support for all 4 common sizes of SSDs, and a silicone cooling pad included too.
It’s also worth noting that if your SSD has a heatsink pre-installed, it will not fit in the slim contours of this enclosure. Keep that in mind when deciding what drive to buy!
How does it perform?
So let’s get down to brass tax here. How fast is this drive? The short answer is “it’s on the slightly slower end,” but I had zero problems working directly on complex Final Cut Pro files directly from the drive itself.
SSD Speed test | Ugreen SSD enclosure (with SanDisk PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD) | SanDisk Extreme Pro with USB4 - 2TB |
|---|---|---|
Blackmagic (read) | 982.1 MB/s | 1763.9 MB/s |
Blackmagic (write) | 969.2 MB/s | 1715.2 MB/s |
While I did find myself waiting for an a few extra minutes to transfer a 250GB monster of a file, I’m happy to wait that extra time for the sake of saving many dollars ($299 vs $120 in this instance). These speeds are much closer to your mid-range drives that top out at around the 1,000 MB/s mark.
On top of that, the drop protection is also pretty great! You’ve got an aluminum enclosure with surrounding silicone. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not the fully-enclosed ultra-durable likes of the Sandisk Extreme Pro. But there’s enough here on the corners and the body to keep your NVMe safe in the enclosure.
And if ever you want to expand the storage or switch out the drive, it’s a cinch. Just ensure that if you do get more expensive models with faster speeds that you update the firmware. Ugreen’s been optimizing them quietly in the background, and you could get more speed and stamina from it if you do.
The ultimate budget hack
My day job is pretty storage-intensive, and working in the computing team, you end up with a whole lot of NVMe SSDs that you’ve tested with nowhere to really use them. So for me personally, an enclosure has breathed new life into my gear.
But for you, dear reader, when you take a look at the prices of portable SSDs, then compare them to just getting a separate drive and enclosure, it’s like you’ve unlocked a secret money glitch. And while there is a small sacrifice to the speed, you can still work on files directly on the drive with no slowdown.
Plus let’s not forget the fact that if your solid portable SSD fails, you’ve just got a dead drive. With this, however, all you have to do is swap out the drive. Whether you’re heading back to college and dreading the massive file transfers, or you need some additional storage on the cheap, this is the way to go. Make no mistake about it, this is the best $17 I’ve spent all year!
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