Drive Enclosures

A drive enclosure is an empty case that turns an internal drive into an external one. It is frequently the better value route: an enclosure plus a good SSD often costs less than an equivalent finished external drive, lets you pick the exact capacity, and means the drive can be reused later.

It is also how you recover data from an old machine — pull the drive out, put it in an enclosure, and read it over USB.

Match the enclosure to the drive, because these are not interchangeable:

M.2 NVMe enclosures take the stick-shaped PCIe drives. M.2 SATA enclosures take a physically similar but electrically different drive — an NVMe drive will not work in a SATA caddy. 2.5in SATA enclosures take laptop hard drives and SATA SSDs. 3.5in enclosures take desktop hard drives and need their own mains power.

Match the interface speed too. A fast NVMe drive in a 5Gbps enclosure is capped well below its potential; USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) or better is what you want for NVMe.

Tool-less models need no screwdriver. The range covers ADATA, Digitus, StarTech and ASUS.