A handy way of keeping old drives going.

This little Ugreen enclosure is one of the most useful tech purchases I've made in a while. I know that might seem a little ridiculous to say, but allow me to explain. This little box can take any M.2 SSD you have lying around and, in a matter of moments, repurpose it as a capacious USB drive. I've been using mine with a 2TB Crucial P310, and it's worked a charm. What's more, at just £16 from Amazon, it's quite the bargain to help you upcycle some drives that would otherwise go on a pile and do nothing.

It is, essentially, a small metal box with a M.2 slot inside that fits in virtually any size of NVMe drive, be it one of the smaller 2230 drives used in Steam Decks, or the more commonly found 2280 drives used in desktops and laptops. You don't even need the fun of an M.2 screw, as this enclosure features tool-less installation. It is a tad finicky with the rubber nubbin for putting the drive back in, but then again, I am a bit of a ham-fisted idiot, so you'll probably have better luck. On the top side of the enclosure is a thermal pad for better heat dissipation to keep your drive cooler, which is useful.

This is a USB-C enclosure, so it'll fit well with modern systems that feature the connector, such as MacBooks from the last 5+ years and a lot of Windows laptops and desktops. 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 a lot faster than comparable capacity USB-C flash drives.

You get a USB-C to USB-C cable included in the box for the sake of convenience, while there is also support for older SATA drives if you don't have any NVMe drives knocking around. There is also no need to install extra drivers, either. Simply slot the drive in, and plug the enclosure in, and you should be good to go. Build quality here is solid too, with an aluminium enclosure, and some silicone padding to help with protection in case you drop it - it happens. My one comes with a 2TB Crucial SSD inside that houses Final Cut Pro editing libraries, plus associated video and photo files, and it's worked well. There is also another one somewhere with an older 512GB Patriot SSD I salvaged from a PC we sold, and that's been useful to have for ferrying files about and for storing all kinds of stuff without going through the age-old flash drive lottery.

If you want to repurpose an old SSD as a speedy flash drive, this Ugreen M.2 SSD to USB-C enclosure offers you the chance for a bargain price from Amazon.