External NVME SSD Enclosure, USB or TB ?

[TS-12]

I ran out of internal SSD storage on my M1 MacBook, and need to get external storage, for:
-Kontakt Sample Libraries
-MUSIO Libraries
-Orchestral Tools libraries
-Spitifre Libraries
etc..

fast loading times of smaple libraries is very important to me.

I have Corsair MP510 and Samsung 980 NVME drives I can use in an external storage enclosure instead of buying a new external SSD drive.

The question is, is it necessary to get Thunderbolt enclosure ( $120 ) , or will USB 3 ( USB-C connector ) ( $40 ) should be sufficient enough ?

[uOpt]

fast loading times of smaple libraries is very important to me.
[...]
The question is, is it necessary to get Thunderbolt enclosure ( $120 ) , or will USB 3 ( USB-C connector ) ( $40 ) should be sufficient enough ?

Nobody did real benchmarking yet.

[mjolnir]

Personally, I'm skeptical that it will be sufficient enough for modern pro audio.
Yes, it will probably be sufficient for basic WAV audio work, but for many tracks and samples it might be not quite enough.
But I could be completely wrong. I'm basing this opinion on when I tried to run FL Studio off of my external drive via USB-C.
But the reality is that it's too complicated to know if the USB-C was the main reason that it was buggy or not. It actually might have been a Linux/WINE or just an FL Studio 24 thing.

[Kaine]

I have Corsair MP510 and Samsung 980 NVME drives I can use in an external storage enclosure instead of buying a new external SSD drive.

The question is, is it necessary to get Thunderbolt enclosure ( $120 ) , or will USB 3 ( USB-C connector ) ( $40 ) should be sufficient enough ?

Both Gen 3 drives, so 3500MB/s max.

What generation are the respective ports, as in what are the speed of those ports?

USB3.2 Gen 1 does 625MB/s
USB3.2 Gen 2 does 1250MB/s
USB3.2X2 does 2500MB/s so it gets you most of the way there, probably fast enough.

USB4 & TB3/TB4 do 5000MB/s so if you want the drive to max out in this instance, then Thunderbolt would be your solution.