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Buy used Samsung mSata or m.2 2230 drives on fleaBay. Stick with Samsung and other well known brands with decent spec sheets and warranties, that's the cheapest way to handle durable storage on a pi. USB enclosures are like $5-7 on AliExpress or fleaBay.
Buy MLC drives if you need higher endurance (check the model no and look up the datasheet.) TLC will usually be fine for a few years, MLC will last a bit longer. If you're killing drives faster than you expect buy larger (512 instead of 256GB),
blkdiscardthe entire device once it's installed and then only partition 60-80% of it. Never touch the rest of the freed storage and the drive controller should be able to use those blocks for wear levelling to reduce the NAND wear rate.Edit: One heads up, I usually buy used drives from eBay because their buyer protection is top tier, if there's anything wrong with the drive when it's delivered or when I test it it goes right back for a refund. This makes buying blind viable thanks to an easy return policy.
If you're sourcing used drives somewhere else insist on seeing SMART data before purchasing and don't buy heavily worn drives. Look at the drive model datasheet, find the warranted endurance of the drive (if it's a 512GB drive rated for 1 DWPD over 3y that means the rated endurance is ~ 0.5T * 365 * 3 or roughly ~550TB written over 3y. Pass on buying drives approaching their rated endurance, try to buy lightly used drives wherever possible and you shouldn't have problems with reliability.
whoa whoa, I would not recommend a cheap AliExpress USB enclosure at all. As others have already pointed out there's a whole ever-growing blacklist of partially incompatible enclosures that basically flake out whenever they feel like it. Worse yet, not every device is on the list so you frequently have to research and add devices yourself.
The last generic Inland m.2 enclosure I bought worked fine... for 1 hour. Then it disconnected and reconnected. I thought it was just random chance, until it happened again and again and again. Did the deep-dive research, found the chipset was partially incompatible and I had to return it.
DO NOT BUY CHEAP ENCLOSURES FOR EXTERNAL MEDIA ON RPI
My approach to this has always been to buy one enclosure and validate it, then go buy like 8 more after thorough testing. Obviously don't place an order for 10 units of an unknown tech item from AliExpress or you're looking at a bad time. Look for enclosures that use known good chipsets and there's not as much risk as you're expecting. I have something like 8 msata enclosures here that work flawlessly and another half dozen sata+nvme rtl9210b enclosures that also work well.
What about enclosures from Sabrent? That should be a reliable manufacturer, no?
Unfortunately I don't have any recommendations I can give you as each enclosure could use a different chipset. It seems that the brand does not have a good reputation for compatibility but that list is fairly old at this point. All I can say is if you find an enclosure you like, plug the model number into the raspberry pi forum and see if anybody had to add it to the quirks list.