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How often your equipment gets wet might bend purchasing decisions in its direction, but not all users will consider it a deal-breaking requirement. If you have Thunderbolt 3 ports or intend to add this functionality soon, then the Envoy Pro FX might well be worth your time and money. But this isn’t the only caveat, as external speeds are dependent on the internal drive performance of the computer it is connected.
Those wanting faster external drives can use one designed for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 or Thunderbolt, and OWC makes plenty of the latter. Lightning Fast: Advanced OWC Aura Pro SSD storage technology with TRIM support works with Thunderbolt to deliver the fastest and most reliable performance available in a portable driveWide 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. Or there’s the Kingston DataTraveler Max. This is slower and not anywhere close to as rugged, but it’s smaller. The bottom of the drive has two non-skid rubber feet to prevent it from sliding around on a desk or other surface. On the front of the drive is a slim LED status light that appears blue when the drive is powered on and flashes slowly during file transfers, but the LED isn't very bright, so I found it pretty useless during daylight hours. (I'm no pro photographer, so the picture above makes the LED look brighter than it is.) Where on each capacity, the read speed holds up well, on the 240GB model, the write performance is reduced to around just 1,145MB/s.
The SSD currently available in capacities of 240GB, 480GB, 1TB and 2TB. Here’s hoping OWC eventually releases versions with additional capacity. The OWC Envoy Pro SX can be used almost anywhere. You don’t have to coddle it. This approach cleverly provides a means to cover both USB standards, as the hiding of the USB Type-A blade inserts it into an adapter for USB-C.
Ultimate portable performance for Thunderbolt and USB
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. We can see a perfectly reasonable argument that could be made to say you only get all of that beautiful quality engineering at its true cost, but that doesn’t make the hole in our bank account any more palatable. 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. 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.
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