I recently got one of these for my new Mac Studio and it's a phenomenal product for external storage:

<https://amzn.to/44AAMQz>

It's a solid piece of aluminum with a circuit board where you can mount a NVME M.2 stick (like they use in the Playstation).

Real world transfer speeds are 3.5+ GB/s on Thunderbolt 5 (~1 GB/s on TB 3, ~2.5 GB/s on TB 4).

The enclosure is $120 and a 2 TB NVME is in the $120-150 range.

A great way to keep VMs, photos, and other big stuff out of Apple's pricey storage.