This is so cool! The Raspberry Pi comes alive when you put an SSD boot drive in, it becomes such a joy to use (for me it also offered a bit of a feeling of safety as I had multiple SD cards die on me in my networking Pi). If you compare running APT on an SD card and SSD you’ll never wanna go back.

As for the cable issue, I struggle with that myself, I designed a ‘tablety’ case for my Pi 4 with the 7” touchscreen and a 2.5 enclosure housing an SSD to run OctoPrint for my 3D printer and couldn’t find a better solution. Maybe Adafruit’s ribbon connector modules would’ve worked but I didn’t want to buy them with overseas shipping. I’m attempting to learn electronics to maybe one day be able to make my own boards to more elegantly integrate the Pi with other hardware within the same enclosure.