Drive enclosures and card readers

Buying guide

An old laptop drive doesn't have to be thrown away: put it in an enclosure and it becomes external storage. When choosing an enclosure, the drive size (2.5 or 3.5 inch) and interface (SATA or M.2 NVMe) must match – they aren't interchangeable. With a card reader, what matters is that it supports the card format your camera or drone uses. Anything slower than USB 3.0 noticeably slows down transferring large files.