I have several external hard drives that came to me as junk, because they were in an enclosure that no longer worked.
The best one, was a Seagate 8TB HD (not an SSD). It almost took the jaws of life to get the drive out of that plastic enclosure, but it was worth the effort, because I now have it mounted permanently in my MAIN desktop PC, and I use it as a Storage/Backup drive.
Very few external HD's actually die, but the cheap enclosures that they are in certainly do.
So, if an external HD seems to fail, I'll just pull the drive out of the enclosure, and 90% of the time, the drive will be OK.
Cheers mates!
Shadow