M.2 hard drives

Wondering how many have switched over to using M.2 hard drives for working images.  For years I've been using 3.5" enterprise drives in Burly Drive enclosures with fans (All good so far but They have gone out of business.) as I traveled back and forth to my office with all my work with me.  Not as often these days so thinking of one internal and one external. 

I could easily fit all my files to be worked on an 8TB drive and all finished work on a second disk.

Also wonder about a good external enclosure if I wanted to go that route.

All the internet searching I come up with always just seems to do the more standard units for external drives like MyBook etc.

Thanks for any input.   Jim

I've considered it but would want much more than 8TB - I would like it to be my primary data storage so it would need to be probably 3 times the size. It certainly would work though as you suggest as a working drive. I think it's pointless though if you are going to put it in an external enclosure as you negate most of the performance benefits. The beauty of it is that it is motherboard attached and that brings with it huge speed benefits that are negated by having to go through an external interface. Many MOBOS have a second M2 slot - that would be the way to go.

Thanks for the input E.J. Totally agree with you that the speed would be nothing special because of the connection method. For many years I've been toting a burly drive enclosure (with fans etc) in my briefcase back and forth to my store office pretty much daily. I was considering an M.2 drive mostly so it would fit in a shirt pocket etc. 8TB is small but was thinking of just putting the material currently in process on it. In the end I went more traditional.

I do already have 2 M.2 drives internally and it's just amazing how fast files transfer from one to the other! At some point I'm sure they will be bigger, cheaper and have faster connections for external uses! By then I'll probably be retired though

Or you could just get one of the tiny pocketable SSDs like the ones from Samsung.