Have you ever heard about 2230 SSDs? They're compact, fast, and can be found used on eBay for just about €20. What about using one as an external SSD? Sounds attractive, right? You'll need a USB adapter starting from €10, and then a case. You can either buy one or print your own!

In the end, you can have a very fast and tiny external drive with a custom case without spending too much. I did just that. Here’s how:

1.     Samsung PM991a SSD 256GB NVMe M.2 2230 for €19.90 + €4 delivery

2.     SSD Adapter to USB 3.1: JMS583 NVMe SSD Adapter to USB 3.1 Type-C 1000Mb/s SSD Converter for 2230 for $11.99 from eBay.

However, when I received both items, I was disappointed. I connected the SSD to the adapter and then to my laptop, but the laptop didn’t recognize it. My first thought was that the SSD or the adapter was broken.

Later, I discovered that I needed to initialize it first—my bad! 😊 You can use the Disk Manager utility in Windows for this. Be sure the label you assign to your SSD is unique, otherwise you may end up in a situation like I did, where Disk Manager detects the disk, but it remains invisible in the Windows file browser! Once the disk is initialized, format it.

The next step was to print a case. Since I'm a big fan of the Fallout 4 game as well as the Netflix series, I decided to make it in the style of Fallout. The result is in the picture below 😊. I think it looks pretty good.

Of course, I tested it to see how fast my new Fallout SSD is. I used the CrystalDiskMark utility and compared it against an external SSD the Crucial X10 1TB and Sandisk 500Gb. I was pleasantly surprised by the test results. My custom SSD performed at the same level, or even better, than the Crucial X10 and Sandisk !

Let me illustrate result by the picture below.

But there is one thing to note: heat dissipation. The 2230 SSD is very compact, so the area for heat dissipation isn’t big. This means that under constant load for a long time, it will heat up significantly, reducing its efficiency (speed). If you're not doing anything to cool it down, this can be a problem. In my case, it really doesn’t matter since I’m using it just as a very fast USB drive to keep my docs.