These days most of them seem to work just fine on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I use several brands across all 3 and never had an issue. I like the DOCKCASE Visual Smart ($40) or Explorer Edition ($50). They have large capacitors to provide 10 seconds of power loss protection, support 10Gbps USB speeds, and have a second USB port just for power which makes it compatible with SSD's that draw a lot of power. I like the info on the little screens because I swap SSD's in/out frequently. There are cheaper ones that work fine too - the "SABRENT USB 3.2 Type-C Tool-Free Enclosure" ($30) is nice for, well, not needing a screwdriver to swap out the drive - but it might not deliver enough power for some overkill SSD like the (now Sandisk) WD Black SN8100 - but the DockCase will, as long as you also plug in an auxiliary power USB cable.

A drive like the Patriot Memory P400 Lite is very low power, so it works with cheaper enclosures or USB ports that don't deliver as much power to the peripheral. It also generates less heat, which can help sustain performance depending on the enclosure and environment.

Which filesystem do you use that handles large disks and can be mounted by Linux, Windows, and Mac?

I have experience with ext4 not through deliberate choice but through circumstance.

ext4 can't be natively mounted in Mac and Windows but you can install third party software and still mount it from the command line easily. And of course ext4 works fine with Linux natively.

I don't know if you can install the Mac OS or Windows OS on an ext4 drive and directly boot from it, however.

Ext4 and NTFS. FUSE for linux and Paragon Software for MacOS. Though often I have three partitions, so I use APFS, NTFS, and Ext4 on the same drive.

A related challenge is encryption of removable flash storage.

Linux has FUSE read-only support for decrypting APFS. iOS can read/write encrypted APFS that is formatted on macOS.

Would be nice to have encrypted ZFS support on multiple platforms, including iOS and Android.

ExFAT is becoming a good option on all three. Windows and MacOS have native support, and more and more Linux distros are getting support as well I believe.

The exFAT suggested below is really not resilient enough that I could trust GBs of data on it. Easily gets corrupted.

If you don't need to use it on Mac/Windows, use a FS like BTRFS with checksumming feature.

Don't use any FS that doesn't have checksum feature as silent bitrot is real.

So, nothing? Unbelievable

NTFS

When you say Linux, reliability depends on distro. I had tried to install Mint on an external harddrive, and the stupid installer modified the boot loader to search for Grub on the removable disk. No removable disk, no grub, no booting of any OS. Idiotic. Lets not get started on the repair/recovery process since another mainstream OS recovery tools wont mount Fat32 EFI partition in R/W, needed to verify the uuid for bootmanager.exe - long story short, had to reinstall everything. Note - neither Windows or Linux are on that box anymore, but Haiku and OSX works brilliantly.

I am begining to dislike mint, that I incidentaly downoaded via mobile data onto an old hinky android phone, then put on a usb drive with a usb/c adapter, with "etchDroid", and booted an ancient desk top with. The phone I have now, has a sim tray with places for 2 SIM's and an SD card, so with one of these 1TB, USB-C drives and a 1 TB SD card, it should be possible to carry a local copy of OSM, and a copy of wikipedia(text only) with plenty of room left, the full wiki is a monsterous 410 TB

Every Wikipedia article including pictures is ~111GB. Unless you want all of the edit history then maybe you are right.

I have had Wikipedia on my phone for years, local search is fast enough. I also recommend Wiktionary, which has practically every word in every language and is less than 10GB.

https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng

ok!thanks I took the numbers I found at face value. Having local copys of OSM and wiki will be a big asset for work, as mobile data is my only source, and it is not exactly reliable. though I do have enough data on my business plan to indulge in an occasional download frenzy from the awsome site you linked.

https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng