I would just look at the external Crucial X6 - and get a case for it. Especially with Black Friday and amazon having stuff on sale today. I have the 4TB and the 2TB version - bought 12 months apart for the same price each time.

I've never heard of any issues with crucial drives - you normally won't get the speed advertised on external SSDs because they heat up and slow down but they are small, light and fast enough (faster than hard drives for sure). I found for example using it as an external steam drive was a pain when I was moving games to it but once they were there over usb-c performance was as good as playing the game on a 2.5 inch internal SSD.