tbh I spent way too long looking at the prices of those high-end pre-made drives and just couldnt justify the cost. I ended up going a bit of a DIY route to save some cash and it’s been a bit of a learning curve for me... 1. Basically, I bought a separate enclosure and a stick of memory separately. It ended up being quite a bit cheaper than the big brand names for the same capacity.
2. I realized that while the M4 supports the really fast stuff, for my daily tasks, I didn't realy need the absolute top-tier speeds. The mid-range setup I put together hits decent speeds and honestly? I can't tell the difference when I'm just moving files around.
3. Heat was a thing I was worried about since the little metal box I got gets kinda warm, but so far it hasn't throttled or anything. Well actually, I did have a wierd issue with the cable that came with the enclosure at first, but switching to a different one fixed the random disconnects. Defintely worth looking into the DIY path if youre trying to keep the total price down...

I've been using the Samsung T7 Shield with my M4 Mini for about three months now. Great performance (around 1,000MB/s), durable build, and reasonably priced. The Shield version has better thermal management than the regular T7, which matters if you're doing sustained transfers.