A bit off topic but can anyone say why external ssd drives are so much more expensive than internal?

Didn't realize there was so much of a price difference. You can always buy an internal SSD and a $15 external enclosure, put the internal SSD in the external enclosure, and pat yourself on the back.

Probably not the whole answer, the but enclosure is a part of that.

I always found it weird that externals were cheaper than internals. So much so people are buying them and ripping out drives to install as internals.

I've always have felt that external drives are even cheaper than internals. At least, now in the few past 5 years. Storage options have incremented throughout the whole board. Now you have high capacity cheap USB drives, WD My Passport cheap drives, cheap external SSD's, high capacity microSD cards.

You can still go with the route of for example buying an OWC Internal SSD and use it with its case, but it would probably be cheaper buying a high capacity USB 3.0 pendrive, or even more practical in terms of packability and size (a high capacity SD or microSD card).

I, of course prefer the standard external SSD drive for proper storage. As it surely has to be a bit faster than an external USB 3.0 high capacity pendrive, but also because i dont lose it and feel its more solid to store things. That said, right now my daily driver are High capacity USB 3.0 drives as sometimes... well i need storage on on the go format.

I just bought a 128gb USB-3 pen drive , same capacity as the SSD drive on my laptop.

That's more than enough for all my docs plus backup.