I wanted to move my Adobe Lightroom library to a portable SSD so I could use it on both my desktop and laptop. Instead of purchasing a pre-built SSD, I built my own for a fraction of the cost (and I can upgrade it later if I need to).

USB SSDs Are The Easiest Solution, But Offer No Upgrade Path

Typically, when one thinks of a USB SSD, pre-built models are the first thing that come to mind. Models like the Samsung T7 Shield, Crucial X10 Pro, and others are what I normally think of when imagining a USB SSD.

However, these are far too often actually way more limiting than you’d expect. While great if you want a simple solution, there’s no upgrade path. If you buy a drive that’s USB 3.2 10Gb/s, then you’ll always be stuck at that speed. If you buy a 1TB drive, you’ll always be stuck with that amount of storage.

This might be fine for many people, but it’s not for me. While, yes, I do have a few of these style of drives (500GB portable SSDs that I purchased nearly a decade ago), when I was recently looking to pick up a drive to use for my photos, I wanted to go a different route. 500GB wouldn’t have been enough for what I wanted, and I also wanted to have the ability to upgrade the drive in the future, be that a higher capacity or faster read and write speeds.

USB M.2 Enclosures Allow You To Easily Upgrade Your Drive

In recent years, SSDs have gotten really fast. M.2 SSDs can now hit transfer speeds of 14GB/s (or more) with PCIe 5.0. That’s insane. USB, on the other hand, can only dream of speeds that fast. That’s where M.2 enclosures come in.

When I set out to look for a way to get portable storage for my Lightroom library, I was about to pull the trigger on a 1TB external SSD like many would think of doing. However, I remembered that I had a few spare 1TB NVMe drives (a perk of being a PC builder for years) and realized I could just get an enclosure to repurpose that old drive. It only cost $15 on sale to get a USB enclosure instead of spending $100 on an external SSD. Not only did I save some money by reusing hardware I already owned, but it also left me with the ability to upgrade in the future.

You see, instead of being stuck to one transfer speed cap like I would be with a pre-built external SSD, I can just swap out the enclosure for one that uses a different standard, like USB4, Thunderbolt 4, or even the incoming Thunderbolt 5, and keep my same 1TB drive if I need faster transfer speeds in the future. Or, I could just take and swap the 1TB drive out for a 2TB, 4TB, or even 8TB NVMe drive down the line if I need more storage — which can sometimes be quite a bit cheaper than buying yet another pre-built external SSD.

At the end of the day, building my own external SSD saved me quite a bit of cash. Plus, it will allow me to upgrade either part of the storage drive in the future with relative ease. Building my own drive checked all my boxes, including price, which I wasn’t expecting when I set out to migrate my Lightroom library.

Whether you have spare NVMe drives lying around, or you’re purchasing new, I recommend building your own portable SSD instead of buying a pre-built one. Typically, there’s only one or two screws required, and you will have far more flexibility down the road too.