GoKawiilAI-driven demand has pushed prices to insanely high levels for the best external SSDs and the best flash drives — if you can find those sought-after models in stock at all these days. But if you’re a long-time PC builder or you've upgraded your laptop's boot drive in the last decade, there’s a good chance you have an older drive of some kind sitting in a drawer or in a closet, doing nothing more useful than collecting dust.
Whether it's a SATA SSD, an OEM M.2 from an older laptop, or even a spinning hard drive, you can turn any of these into handy external storage by picking up one of the best SSD and hard drive enclosures , with some options selling for less than $10 when on sale. In most cases, you won't even have to mess with a screwdriver. Just open the enclosure, drop in your old drive, and you're good to go.
Of course, the drive you have and the enclosure you choose will dictate how fast your DIY external drive will be. But speed doesn't matter much if you're just doing simple backups or transferring a few files. And even a SATA SSD is pretty speedy for most mainstream tasks. If you're using the drive to edit lots of 4K video, doing animation work, or running local LLMs, you'll need a faster, newer PCIe 4 or 5 M.2 SSD and an enclosure that can deliver as much bandwidth as your fastest USB-C port can handle.
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To break down the kind of speed you can expect from digging out an older hard drive or SSD and putting it to work as external storage, we installed several older drives (and even a speedy recent PCIe 5 model) into various enclosures and put them through some of the same tests we use for testing brand-new drives. And we'll compare those results to speedy dedicated external SSDs and flash drives, to see what, if any, speed you might lose.
Of course, every individual drive model will have its own performance variances, as we see when testing internal SSDs, but the results and charts below will give you a sense of what to expect, generally, from whatever class or type of drive you happen to have at your disposal, and whether it's speedy enough for your needs.
I grabbed four different drives, three of which were older drives of various types that I found in my storage drawer or in older enclosures, and ran some of the tests that we typically run for external storage reviews, to see how they perform compared to a high-end flash drive and a fast external SSD.
Drives
▶️ Western Digital WD5000BPVT 2.5-inch hard drive (500GB)
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