OWC Envoy Pro USB 3.0 External Enclosure for Solid State Drive

Product Information

In 4-thread performance, the Envoy Pro FX recorded 1.03GB/s read and 1.04GB/s write in 2MB sequential. In 2MB random, the OWC portable drive hit 975.4MB/s read and 1.04GB/s write, while 4K random performance showed 36,127 IOPS read and 72,037 IOPS write. Anyone considering the OWC Envoy Pro SX should also take a look at the OWC Envoy Pro FX. This is almost as fast, comes in the same rugged casing, and can be used with almost any device that supports USB. The NVMe M.2 SSD inside the Envoy is rated for a maximum transfer rate of 980MBps; it fell just shy of that in our testing, but it was within the margin of error. The other drives charted here below are also USB 3.2 Gen 2 models with PCI Express innards. These drives are in a class of their own, in contrast to earlier external SSDs based on SATA technology. Those drives tend to top out hundreds of megabytes per second below these USB 3.2 Gen 2 ones. But it won‘t work if you plug the SSD into an ordinary USB-C port. That’s true for computers that don’t have Thunderbolt, and for Mac accessories that turn Thunderbolt ports into USB-C ones.

Using the popular AmorphousDiskMark 3.1 storage benchmark app by Katsura Shareware, the Envoy Pro FX achieved sequential read and write speeds of up to 3,002 MB/s and 2,324 MB/s respectively on my Mac. This is a bit above what OWC advertises, but in my actual usage of the drive, data transfer speeds were around the 2,700-2,800 MB/s mark. For example, I was able to transfer a 25GB file in around nine seconds.

Very conveniently for those looking for benchmarks, OWC has a wide selection of tests that they have performed on PC and Mac to show the speed of this unit. For 1-thread IOMeter, the Envoy Pro FX hit 1.82GB/s read and 1.13GB/s write in 2MB sequential. In 2MB random, the OWC portable drive hit 1.82GB/s read and 1.09GB/s write. With 4K random, it recorded 9,224 IOPS read and 1,695 IOPS write. IOMeter 1 Thread On the top side of the Envoy Pro FX is the Thunderbolt and USB 3.2 port (labeled as such). The bottom has a nice, narrow blue status LED, which indicates both power and drive activity so you know what’s going on. Or there’s the Kingston DataTraveler Max. This is slower and not anywhere close to as rugged, but it’s smaller. You can definitely get smaller SSDs with the same capacity. But the extra bulk is armor. It can shrug off being dropped over 25 times at every angle from a height of four feet. And survive up to half an hour in a couple of feet of water.

Xtremely Fast: Supports the max performance capability of any Thunderbolt and USB interface – up to 2800MB/s A few months ago, OWC introduced the Envoy Pro FX, a portable SSD storage drive that is described as "the fastest, most compatible drive ever." I take a closer look at the Envoy Pro FX and its capabilities in my review below. The Sabrent option doesn’t have the same IP67 rating as the Envoy Pro FX and is exclusively for Thunderbolt ports, but the performance levels are comparable for significantly less money. The OWC Envoy Pro SX can handle both. At up to 2847MBps, it’s about as fast as an external SSD can be. And it’s rugged so you don’t have to baby it. Hardware and design Overall, the OWC Envoy Pro Elektron is a gorgeous piece of equipment that most would love to own, but not all could afford this level of quality.

A robust and highly portable external NVMe drive

One other thing we looked at is heat dissipation. With high performance, there can sometimes be high heat, which can introduce issues. We took a look at the drive while it was being tested with our Seek Scan Thermal Camera. As one can see, the drive is very good with heat dissipation, keeping the drive running at optimal performance. Compatible with:Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS or any system that supports a USB mass storage device. Let’s cut directly to the chase, and say that we love the styling, the very high quality of the engineering and finish, its robustness, portability and solid performance. All those things are admirable, and we salute OWC for such single-minded design endeavours. Those wanting faster external drives can use one designed for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 or Thunderbolt, and OWC makes plenty of the latter. Our only reservation about this design is that when the drive is used in USB-C mode, the unit is at its maximum length, creating a long metal lever on the USB-C port should anything hit the drive or the laptop accidentally drops.