The IT Nerd

Spoiler alert: If you want a fast and high quality portable SSD that will fit a number of use cases, and will likely survive a zombie apocalypse, the OWC Envoy SSD is the one that you should get. You can stop reading the review now.

I’m just kidding. This is why I feel that way. Let’s start with the size of the drive:

I put this SSD next to a mouse so that you can get an idea of the size. It’s tiny. In fact, my wife saw this and said that she could carry a couple of these in her purse. It’s made of aircraft-grade aluminum which makes it not only rugged, but it dissipates heat as well. In fact, during my testing, it was warm to the touch versus other SSD’s of this type that can get very hot to the touch. It’s also very light. On my wife’s kitchen scale it was 45 grams.

The drive comes with a cable and OWC didn’t cheap out on it as you can see here. This cable which is about a foot in length, does 60W power delivery and up to 20 Gb/s in speed. I am pointing this out because this is one area where companies often cut corners. OWC not only didn’t do that, but they went overboard in terms of the cable that they provide. Thus that has to be noted as a big plus.

The drive is bus powered and is USB-C only with a light to right of the USB-C connector. That means that it has a theoretical maximum speed of 10Gb/s.

OWC quotes a speed of “over” 1000MB/s for this drive. As you know, I take any speed claims for any device with a grain of salt. But when I tested this drive, I was pleasantly surprised:

The read speed is pretty close to 1000MB/s, and the write speed is above that speed on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Thus I can see this drive doing better than the speeds I got. It also means that OWC wasn’t just throwing a number into the product’s web page to get your attention, and hoping that someone like me wouldn’t call them on it when those speeds didn’t measure up to reality.

Another interesting thing that I want to point out is this:

If you look at the top right corner of this picture, you’ll see a picture of the drive rather than some generic macOS icon. It’s a little thing, but a nice thing.

I’ll also note that the drive comes with a piece of software called Drive Guide which will help you to format it for anything from APFS for use with modern Macs, to exFAT for cross platform compatibility, to HFS+ for older Macs. What’s nice about this is that it saves novice users from having to figure out how to use Disk Utility on Mac to format the drive. OWC also has an app called Copy That Mobile to copy photos and videos from your iPhone or iPad to the drive. I am pointing that out because using this drive with a phone that has USB-C like the iPhone 15 series is a use case that I can see this drive being used in.

The OWC Envoy comes in 1 and 2 terabyte sizes. I have been using the 1 terabyte model and that’s $129 USD. The 2 terabyte model is $249 USD. And I have been impressed enough by this drive that it is going into my Tech Sling as part of the toolkit that I bring to customer sites. It’s small, fast, rugged and decently priced. Simply put, it checks all the boxes for me. And I believe it will check all the boxes for you as well.

This entry was posted on September 11, 2024 at 9:00 am and is filed under Commentary with tags OWC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.