Would a portable drive be OK?
My issue with bus-powered "portable" drives is that they seen far more troublesome and less reliable that those with and independent power supply. Also, I've never had a 3.5-inch desktop-class drive in a backup capacity fail, but have lost several of the cheap little 2.5-inch HDDs used in "entry-level" external drives.
Also, a desktop computer does not need a "portable" drive unless the drive must be shared with a mobile computer or device. And given that cloud storage like iCloud Drive and DropBox have largely limited that concern for me, I get real desktop-class external drives that bring they own power to the party
To me, the place an external SSD shines is on an older Mac with a slow mechanical internal hard drive that is struggling with modern macOS versions. There, an external USB3 or ThunderBolt 3/4 SSD can be set as the boot volume. That is NOT and issue with an M1 iMac because the internal integrated storage is already as fast or faster than most external SSD's.
Beyond that, all I can say is that our five active backup drives are all OWC and have given impressive service and reliability. For our iMacs, I buy the bare OWC Mercury Elite USB3 enclosures and install WD 3.5-inch SATA 6GB 7200rpm "Black" series drives inside.
As an aside, in our box of spare tech stuff is a geriatric OWC "Neptune" external drive we bough easily 15 years ago. It still works perfectly but is just not fast, as it is a FireWire 400 model.