It does look like a good choice if you decide to get a thumb drive.
Most of us remember when external HDDs could be had cheaper than similar bare drives, had this reason to shuck drives, or had a drive failure so had 3.5" USB external HDD cases left over.
Have you found any limitations in reusing the cases with new drives, especially supporting higher capacity HDDs?
I don't recall all the cases I have but thinking Hitachi XL, or Seagate GoFlex/Expansion/Backup Plus Hub, cases that came with around 2TB to 4TB HDDs in them originally.
I did some research and it may depend on whether they use 32bit LBA or 64bit addressing, implying that cases from 2TB or smaller products may not support over 2TB:
https://superuser.com/questions/308492/is-there-a-size-limit-on-external-usb-hard-drives
Is there a way to determine this, a list, or do I need to get the chip ID of one of the chips and can look it up from that or is it also firmware related?
I have also seen reports that some cases only address 4TB worth of a larger drive's capacity which leaves me wondering why, how can they address more than 2TB but not more than 4TB. I lost the links to some of those but here is one:
I'm hoping for replies from people who have faced a capacity limitation when reusing a USB enclosure, details of that and especially if it was one of the models I mentioned above.
I'm aware of the encryption issue with WD Mybooks but never bought any of those for that reason.
Depends on how much you value portability vs performance.
If I plan to take a device anywhere, I don't want a cord, period. Then again I'm male and don't carry a sack or purse so there's that limitation. If traveling and I had a suitcase, it's less of an issue.
At the same time, USB flash drives with good performance (integral SSD controller and enough parallel lanes/chips to do so), tend to get pricey per capacity, and the amount of data out there to store just keeps growing, so it would be hard for me to accept getting a 512GB flash drive when the other alternatives are 4X the capacity, unless you also have other storage like HDDs and this is just to sneakernet data around.
Anyway I never found a need for an external SSD. Almost all use cases I have, are better met by a fast USB flash drive, or client and server side internal or USB external 3.5" HDDs.