Recommend me an external SSD and enclosure

I have a photo library of about 3 TB that I’d like to store on an external SSD for quick access to work on and as an element of my backup strategy. Looking at prices on Amazon it seems like for the price of an off the shelf drive you can buy one that is much much faster if you buy the SSD and enclosure separately. So I have a number of questions- firstly are there some drawbacks to doing it yourself other than clumsy fingers breaking things? Is it as easy as YouTube makes out? What do I need to look out for when buying stuff to make sure the components are compatible? Any brands or models to look out for or avoid? My first instinct would be to buy Samsung or Crucial. Does that make sense?

Really, any tips very welcome. I’m not a brilliant DIYer so feel free to point out the bleedin obvious.

It depends a lot on what you want. Buying a finished product (QNAP or Synology or something) means you gain a lot of time and support. You feed it disks and it builds the array and stores your data. Software comes out that makes this process safer or easier. If something goes wrong, you can get a new one.

If you self-build, you need the parts, the learnings, the will to support it. If something goes wrong with, say, a system using RAID on a Pi5, you need to be able to felsök it and fix it. People have likely done that for you, but finding out what to do can be a pain.

It really sounds like you should trade off money for a more finished product, soemthing that should just work. But please, do not expose it to the internet and do choose a RAID model with parity so that, if/when a drive fails you can re-build the array.

Also, think about whether you really need M.2/SSD. Long term, bulk storage is best done on spinning rust and will be much cheaper than M.2.

Yay another IT can of worms.. I’m assuming your talking about a single drive plugged in via USB? A simple 2.5″ Sata SSD and a enclosure for 2.5″ Sata drives, is easy to buy, put together and will be recognised by your computer (You will probably need to format the drive for the computer to use it). Samsung is a great brand, with a decent warranty, I don’t have issue with Crucial, but I’ve friends who disagree (IT can be worse for opinions than ppl on here about bike brands). Buy a caddy that uses your fastest USB port (USB C-> USB3 ->USB2) to get the best out of it. You can then run into m.2 SSD (Sata and PCIe version) drive and enclosure but I’m unaware if there is a performance increase of a PCIe drive in an enclosure, when your main limitation is the USB port speed.

All this circle back to your need, a USB drive of any sort should not be your only source of backup, or really considered a great backup device, as they are more likely to be lost or damaged than an internal drive (especially with so much data..3TB????). A NAT drive enclosure will provide better transfer speeds and allow you to run multiple disc’s in a RAID setup for more data security as per Willards post.

Also quick access? USB is pretty damned slow compared to an internal drive or local NAT device. In terms of convenience (taking data between physical locations) it is a big win though