One of my most useful tech purchases in recent times hasn’t been anythng big or flashy, but a humble Ugreen SSD enclosure. It essentially takes any spare M.2 drive you might have laying around and turns it into a fast external SSD, with minimul fuss and for a lot less cash than just buying a whole new portable drive. I’ve done this with a 2TB Crucial P310 I had left over, and it’s worked a treat for the last year. At Amazon, it’s down to £16 in the UK and $16 in the USA. The latter is for Amazon’s Spring Sale in the States, while the one in the UK is more of a cyclical discount, judging by the price history.

This enclosure essentially works as a small metal box with an M.2 slot and associated interface, and can take anything from the smaller M.2 2230-sized drives fitted in Steam Decks to the longer 2280 drives used in desktops and laptops. You don’t even need to screw anything in, as this enclosure features toolless installation. On the top side of the enclosure is a thermal pad for better heat dissipation, which keeps the drive cooler – which is always welcome, especially if it’s prone to thermal throttling under load.

This is a USB-C enclosure, so it’ll fit particularly well with modern PCs and laptops. To be specific, it supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 with the UASP acceleration protocol to offer theoretical speeds of up to 10Gbps – that’s especially brisk, and works out to read and write speeds on your SSD of up to 1000MB/s. It may not maximise the true read and write speeds of even older PCIe 3.0 drives, but is still several orders of magnitude faster and more responsive than standard flash drives, making it a good choice to use as external games storage or for a media library.

In my experience, its operation is plug and play: slot the drive into place and plug the enclosure in with the bundled USB-C to USB-C cable, and that’s it. You may have to format the SSD you’re using in Windows, macOS or wherever, but then it works like any other external hard drive. The build quality here is solid too, with an aluminium enclosure and silicone padding to help with protection in case you drop it (it happens). I use mine to store Final Cut Pro editing libraries, plus associated video and photo files, and it’s worked well. There is another one somewhere with a smaller Patriot drive that’s just a big USB stick at this point, and it’s gotten to the point I couldn’t do without it.