A few years ago, when I was exploring data storage options for my photos and other large media files, I came across the idea of building my own portable, high-speed storage system.

It involved creating a portable drive using a high-speed SSD and an enclosure that allows you to plug in the SSD, and then using that assembled device as an external hard drive.

I had liked the idea then, but I didn't feel it was significantly better than buying an off-the-shelf external portable SSD.

This week, however, I came across an even more elegant solution to this problem.

Apparently, there are mini SSDs that you can put into a mini enclosure, and the setup then acts as a high-speed pen drive that you can plug into your laptop or tablet.

Here's how that would work:

You'll need to get a mini NVMe M.2 drive like this:

And then fit that drive into a mini SSD enclosure that looks like a pen drive:

This is better than using a regular pen drive because you can get up to 1 GBps of read/write speed, as compared to a few hundred MBps on a regular pen drive.

Now, the SSD drives are usually much faster than that, and if you can buy an enclosure of higher supported speed, such as 40Gbps, this setup will be lightning fast.

It’s a bit more expensive than buying an off-the-shelf portable SSD, but I think it fits nicely between having to upgrade your internal SSD on your laptop or computer and using a bulky external SSD.

You can explore this option if you work with larger files, such as videos, images, 3D files, etc., and you're running out of space on your computer.

Last month, I collaborated with Maker Stations to do a tour of my workspace for their publication.

Here's a sneak peek of my setup:

The feature is now published, and if you're curious where I craft this newsletter and every other piece of work from, here's my entire setup in detail.

Now, speaking of good newsletters, have you tried The Pocket yet?

Before you move on to the rest of this newsletter issue, here are a few words from: