Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
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. Those wanting faster external drives can use one designed for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 or Thunderbolt, and OWC makes plenty of the latter. 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
It’s also certified dustproof, drop-proof, and waterproof, and comes bundled with a cord that supports both Type-C and Type-A ports.As an external drive that fits in the palm of my hand, the Envoy Pro FX can easily be brought on the go, making it a convenient, portable solution for storing files while traveling. With a single Thunderbolt 3 cable that connects to a Mac for data and power, IP67-rated water and dust resistance, and military-grade drop protection, the Envoy Pro FX provides a plug-and-play experience without any worry.
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.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. In testing the real-world Thunderbolt performance of the Envoy Pro SX, I copied a 10.5 GB file from my computer to the external SSD in 7.2 seconds. Transferring the same file from the OWC product to my computer took 10 seconds.
Its score of two seconds in our stopwatch transfer test is typical—all of our comparison drives except the HP P500 were within a second of that. Turning to IOMeter, we measured both 1 and 4 thread, the latter which is a higher load that pushes the SSDs harder. Looking at 1-thread performance, the Envoy Pro FX saw 923.1MB/s read and 874.9MB/s write in 2MB sequential. In 2MB random, the OWC portable drive hit 804.4MB/s read and 881.2MB/s write. With 4K random, it recorded 8,687 IOPS read and 18,414 IOPS write.
OWC Envoy Pro SX review
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. These official results also show Gen 2 USB port speeds and the negative impact using a Gen 1 port has on that performance.
Great Deal 
New Comment