Because of its physical compatibility with USB Type-C, Thunderbolt 3 is likely to avoid the fate of Firewire, another heavily promoted Apple interface that served a niche very well, but failed to appeal to a mass audience. 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. For USB 3.2 Gen 2 connecting users, OWC makes a few less expensive options that are equally robust, and these deliver similar performance levels to the Envoy Pro FX on that interface.

There’s a single Thunderbolt port on one end. This is also how the SSD gets all the power it needs, as well as make data transfers With the Crucial X8 1TB costing almost two thirds the price of the same capacity Envoy Pro Elektron while being nearly as robust, customers might think twice. The only aspect that the OWC product has over the X8, other than styling, is an IP67 rating, making it somewhat resistant to water.With a sleek aluminum housing, the Envoy Pro FX resembles an Apple product, but the white OWC logo and Envoy Pro FX branding takes away from the aesthetic. The drive's "charcoal gray" color is a bit darker than the Space Gray finish of the MacBook Pro, but they still look nice side by side. Along the left and right sides of the drive are what OWC calls "deeply grooved fins" to help with heat dissipation and ensure sustained performance. The fanless drive never felt overly hot to the touch during some large file transfers in my testing. Or there’s the Kingston DataTraveler Max. This is slower and not anywhere close to as rugged, but it’s smaller. The most important fact about the OWC Envoy Pro SX is that it is Thunderbolt only. Apple is a big supporter of this standard and you’ll find Thunderbolt ports on all recent macOS desktops and laptops, and even the latest iPad Pro models. Many PCs have it too. And even a few Chromebooks. But, it’s also worth saying that a modern system with Thunderbolt 3 ports and a powerful CPU is essential if you want to get the best write speeds from this device. 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.

OWC covers the Elektron with a modest three-year warranty. This matches the three years offered by the ADATA SE800 and the Samsung Portable SSD T7, but it falls short of the five years of coverage you get with the two SanDisk SSDs, the 2020 iteration of the WD My Passport SSD, and many other drives. The competition in this sector is hotting up, as the cost of NAND falls and external drive makers wake up to the possibilities.OWC bills the Envoy Pro EX as the fastest USB Type-C SSD on the market. It's compatible with either a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C-to-C cable or a Type-C-to-A (USB 3.0) one, the latter in case your computer doesn't have a USB-C port. However, OWC bundles only the USB C-to-C cable in the box. We'd like to have seen both, especially given the drive's premium price, but, in fairness to OWC, that cable choice befits a Mac-oriented drive expected to be connected, in many cases, to Mac laptops with USB-C ports only. Once write caching was enabled, a speed of 2,336MB/s was possible on the 480GB drive. However, with this feature active, some care needs to be taken when disconnecting the drive to avoid corrupting it. When flash drive designers make something as small as the OWC Envoy Pro Mini, they either go with a switchblade concept where the blade retracts into the drive. Or, as in this case, a hinge is made to allow the drive to rotate and be inserted into the rest of the assembly. Exactly what speeds you can realistically expect depends on numerous factors, including the performance of your PC/Mac, if you connect with Thunderbolt or USB, device contention from other hardware on that bus, and the Envoy Pro FX the specific model. The aluminum casing of the Envoy Pro SX has fins to help it shed the heat that large data transfers can generate. It’s a design that works — I transferred about 300GB of data onto the drive as rapidly as possible and it never got above slightly warm.

But how did the drive handle our performance-testing regimen? Let's move onto the benchmarks... The Fastest Available? As external SSDs go, the OWC Envoy Pro Mini isn’t anything spectacular in the performance stakes. If you want the best external drive performance, then either USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 or Thunderbolt technology is required.While the OWC is technically not the fastest USB Type-C drive we've ever tested, the differences in speed among all of these USB 3.2 Gen 2, PCI Express-based models are so minimal that you'd really need to be looming over the drives with a stopwatch to detect them. And even then, you might not. A Great Choice at the Top End Perhaps with a faster test rig or an M1 Mac, the potential speed might hit 1,000MB/s, but this is something easily achievable with other drives that don’t need 0Fill or default mode. Compatible with:Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS or any system that supports a USB mass storage device.

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.On our test system under CrystalDiskMark 7 a read speed of 953MB/s and write of 966MB/s were recorded, and these results were generally supported by AJA System Test, ATTO and AS SSD. OWC promises data transfers at up to 2847MBps. But sometimes companies hype theoretical top speeds when real-world performance is much less. For those that want beautifully engineered external storage that can provide exceptional performance in the right circumstances, the OWC Envoy Pro FX is ideal. Here, the drive was about a second slower than others we've tested, but let's be real: Are you really going to notice? PCMark 8 Wide compatibility: The drive can be connected to a wide range of devices with Thunderbolt 3/4 or USB-C ports, such as the latest Mac, iPad Pro, and iPad Air models, as well as PCs and Microsoft Surface devices. There is also a USB-A adapter attached to the Thunderbolt cable included in the box.