[idupree]

I can get a good USB2 enclosure for $10-15. My 6.5 year old laptop hard drive is 120GB (and couldn't read/write data via SATA much faster than it can via USB2 anyway).

A 128GB flash drive costs around 5 times as much as that enclosure. Yes, it's better, but it's quite more expensive. A more comparably priced 32GB flash drive stores several times less data (which might matter to you) and may have write speed that can't even saturate USB2 (ditto; I installed Fedora on a 16GB flash drive that has max 3MB/s write speed and it takes amusingly long to install updates, though its read speed is decent and doesn't suffer seek time).

Flash drives will get cheaper, but the meaning of "5 years ago" will change just as quickly (given current trends).