Good point. That might be the way to go. Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn't thought of it, as older USB drives (ie. my experience, 2013 MBP) are much slower

Good point. That might be the way to go. Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn't thought of it, as older USB drives (ie. my experience, 2013 MBP) are much slower for large data than the internal storage, some of my work is storage I/O performance constrained, and I don't want to carry around yet another dongle. But the price differential vs Apple built-in and flexibility/upgradability, at current USB4 speeds makes a compelling case. (I read anout significant differences between M1 and M2 for some flavours of USB storage link speed, which might persuade me to opt for the M2 after all.)