We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
I prefer to spend more on Samsung externals, I have t7 and had no issues with it so far. It's kind of getting hot after some time, but, I believe it's the case for all external SSDs.
I have internal crucial NVMe and it works without any issues as well, not sure how their externals are.
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.