Save hundreds during this storage pricing hellscape by turning an SSD or hard drive you aren’t using into a useful external drive for as little as $8 – put an old drive to good use as external storage

Thanks to ongoing AI-driven demand, trying to find any kind of storage, be it SSD or HDD, on sale at a reasonable price is next to impossible, even during deals events like Amazon’s Prime Day. But if you’ve been a PC builder or even a laptop user for several years, there’s a good chance you have a drive of some kind sitting in a drawer or the back of a closet, doing nothing more useful than collecting dust.

Whether it’s a SATA SSD, an NVMe or SATA M.2 drive that you swapped out for a faster or higher-capacity option in the before times, or even an old-school hard drive, you can drop it into an affordable USB enclosure, plug it into one of your ports, and perhaps save yourself hundreds over what you’d have to pay for a new drive at today’s awful storage prices.

Our Best SSD and hard drive enclosures page collects the best enclosures we’ve personally tested. But we’ll include some on-sale options below, as well as enclosures for older drive types, since these hard times for storage might have you reaching back to some truly old drives that can still be useful. Of course, for those who crave fast throughput and have a fast drive to drop in, we’ll also include a 40Gbps option.

A solid, see-through enclosure for 2.5-inch SATA SSDs or hard drives

There are cheaper 2.5-inch SATA SSD / HDD options, but this option from Orico uses a modern USB-C cable, rather than the more common (for some reason) Micro USB-B connection. This is important, both because Micro-B is rare these days, so you might misplace the cable.

But also, should you want to use a USB-C connector on your PC, rather than the USB-A cable that this enclosure ships with, you probably already have a suitable USB-C to USB-C cable. With other enclosures, you'd almost certainly have to order a Micro-B to USB-C cable. And no one wants one of those if they can avoid it.

Save 15% Orico 2.5 inch Hard Drive SSD Enclosure: was $9.99 now $8.45 at Amazon This USB-C-to-USB-A enclosure is transparent, which some will like and some won’t. But I find it helpful to know at a glance which old drive I have installed. It supports UASP for faster transfers, and drives up to 9.5mm thick and up to 6TB.

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