I exclusively use SAMSUNG T5 Portable SSD 2TB. rock solid. Silent.
I made this little rack last year, only two populated at the time.
Now have 4 slots filled.
I highly recommend.
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I have also ordered my new iMac 8 core I7 64GB and 1TB SSD I’m also thinking of a an SSD for back up, I currently have a bootable 500 GB SSD backup which saved my life when the Fusion Drive on my current Mac went rogue.
The memory will be Kingston at one third the price of the Apple offering.
I still see a lot of people buying overpriced all-in-one solutions. I prefer to buy drive and enclosure separately. Not only does that mean I get to mix and match or replace disks easily as soon as they’re full, it’s also a lot cheaper.
Here’s a 2TB Samsung SSD solution below $300 (after tax). Enclosure supports USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 (IOW it won’t bottleneck your SSD).
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089C6LZ42
Of course you can do the same with M.2, but it’s definitely more expensive and I doubt there would be a real-world benefit (unless you’d go for a more expensive TB3 enclosure).
You could buy or build a cabinet to house your hard drives and any other peripherals you may have. Maybe a nice stereo cabinet with glass doors would look cool. You could add some sound proofing to further lower the noise level.
Given the testimonials here that say Time Machine does work on SSDs (I wonder if the HUGE number of individual writes that a Time Machine backup accumulates over months and years is why there’s at least a “somebody said” recommendation not to do it), one candidate would be OWC’s new Envoy Pro Bus-Powered TB3 enclosure into which you put your own NVMe stick. Not cheap, but not expensive either for true TB3 performance and silence. However, when I bought my “stick” and pre-ordered my Envoy case the ad said “shipping in August” and now says “shipping in September.”
I hope this isn’t a replay of the several months I spent waiting for a dongles-defeating OWC TB3 Dock for my first 4-TB3/USBc MacBook Pro back in 2016.
Jim Robertson