Making my own SSD USB drive $33.18 for 512GB - Enclosure Netac M2 2280 M.2 Aliexpress PCIe USB C 3.1
1The price is good. You pay more than $33.18 to get just a 512GB M.2 SSD from your local online store. Having an enclosure like this is more beneficial because it is also a M.2 SSD reader. The speed is not exceptionally fast, but It's acceptable for me when it’s plugged into a USB 3.1 port anyway. This would still be 3-10 times faster than a traditional external hard drive depending on the files transferred.
The Netac SSD can probably run faster than that. The enclosure is the limitation here. This SSD can be installed into an M.2 SSD slot inside a computer, and used as internal storage. It's genuine. It's the first thing that I would test for every flash memory drive.
P.S. Tested inside a PCI slot, this SSD has 3556 MB/s Read and 2139 MB/s Write. It's very fast. Netac is a good Chinese SSD brand as far as I can tell. This brand has been around for a while.