My leftover NVMe became the portable SSD I almost paid for

When I decided to upgrade my existing Samsung 970 EVO Plus 250 GB to a 1TB NVMe drive, I got myself an SSD enclosure to clone the drive. But I still needed a high-speed portable storage drive, so I was looking at the Crucial X10 as a potential but expensive purchase.

Turns out, the enclosure I bought to clone my NVMe drive can also turn my now-leftover SSD into a portable SSD. So, I dropped my purchase plan and decided to give my spare SSD a new life, and it's been nothing short of impressive for something that might have collected dust in my drawer.

Things you need

An enclosure and an NVMe SSD

I built my portable SSD with parts I already had, and the build consists of two components: the SSD and an enclosure.

The SSD, in my case, was the Samsung 970 EVO Plus 250 GB I had just replaced. It's a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drive rated for 3,500 MB/s sequential reads and 2,300 MB/s writes. It's not the fastest drive by today's standards, but it's still plenty fast for day-to-day file transfers and even running games off of. And looking at what NVMe SSDs cost today, repurposing a spare one is the most economical storage solution I could think of.

The second component is the enclosure, which acts as an M.2 slot for the drive and connects to your PC via USB. For my use case, I went with a UGREEN M.2 NVMe enclosure that cost me around $17. It supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 speeds (10 Gbps), has an aluminum shell with a thermal pad for heat dissipation, and comes with both a USB-A-to-USB-C and a USB-C-to-USB-C cable out of the box. It supports standard M.2 2280, 2260, 2242, and 2230 size drives so that most NVMe SSDs will fit.

One thing to be aware of is that not every M.2 enclosure supports both NVMe and SATA drives. The M.2 slot can carry either type of signaling, so you need to check compatibility before buying. If your spare drive is NVMe (which most modern M.2 SSDs are), make sure the enclosure lists NVMe support.

Finally, you don't need any tools to install the drive. You can slide the case open, slot the SSD in, secure it with a small rubber latch, and push the case back shut.

How well did it perform?

Faster than a flash drive, slower than an internal slot

The first thing I did after setting up the enclosure was run a CrystalDiskMark benchmark to see what kind of speeds I was getting. Sequential reads came in at around 1,000 MB/s, and writes were in the same ballpark. That's roughly in line with what the enclosure's 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection can deliver after accounting for protocol overhead.

Now, that's way below what the Samsung 970 EVO Plus can do when it's sitting in your PC's PCIe M.2 slot. Plugged in directly, this drive can push 3,500 MB/s reads and 2,300 MB/s writes. So, the enclosure is clearly the bottleneck here, not the SSD. The enclosure's USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection tops out at 10 Gbps, which translates to a theoretical maximum of around 1,250 MB/s. After protocol overhead, hitting around 1,000 MB/s means the enclosure is performing roughly as expected.

Despite the slower speed, 1,000 MB/s is still far faster than any USB flash drive I've ever used, and for practical tasks like copying a 10 GB folder, transferring game installs, or backing up project files, the speed difference between 1,000 MB/s and 3,500 MB/s barely registers.

Gaming performance was also fine. I loaded a few titles off the enclosure, and they ran smoothly, with load times that felt nearly identical to running them off an internal SATA SSD. For anything short of sequential benchmarks, the bottleneck doesn't feel like one.

A portable SSD is still faster

But the price gap is hard to ignore right now

I won't pretend this setup matches a purpose-built portable SSD. Something like the Crucial X10 can deliver its advertised 2,100 MB/s read speed because it uses a faster USB 3.2 Gen connection. Dedicated portable SSDs are also a lot more compact, come in capacities up to 8TB, and are built to handle the kind of abuse portable storage tends to see. The X10, for instance, is IP55 rated for water and dust resistance and can survive drops of up to 7.5 feet. My enclosure with its silicone sleeve isn't designed for that kind of punishment.

But the truth is portable SSDs are expensive, and prices have only gone up recently as AI-driven demand for memory chips has tightened the supply. A 1TB Crucial X10 currently runs around $125 to $150, and the 4TB model sits well above $500. My solution cost me nothing because I already had both the SSD and the enclosure from the cloning job. The total investment was effectively $0 for a portable drive that reads at 1,000 MB/s.

Even if you only have a spare NVMe SSD lying around and need to buy an enclosure, basic models start at around $10. Spending a few dollars more gets you a quality metal-cased enclosure with better thermal management, like the UGREEN I used. If you're buying both the SSD and enclosure, it's worth checking a few key things before picking an NVMe SSD so you get the right drive for your needs. Either way, you're looking at a fraction of the cost of a retail portable SSD.

Turning your old SSDs into external drives

Turning an old NVMe drive into a portable SSD took very little effort. On top, the enclosure is small enough to toss in a bag, and because it's aluminum, it does a decent job pulling heat away from the drive during sustained transfers. And it handles that job better than any flash drive I've owned.