New Gear Review: Envoy SSD Range by OWC

With lightning fast speeds, ultra portability, and a super rugged build, can the Envoy drives from OWC find their way into your workflow?

OWC (Other World Computing) has long been among the top retailers and makers of hard drive and memory upgrades among music makers, filmmakers and others working in creative fields.

Recently, the company has released the Envoy range of portable solid state hard drives, with three different models.

The Envoy series drives are fast, rugged, and sizable storage solutions. Each provides a little something different, from a 1TB SSD the size of a flash drive, to a 2TB SSD that is water resistant, to the Envoy Pro EX Thunderbolt 3, which offers a speed of up to 2500MB/s. Let’s take a closer look.

Features

The smallest of the trio is the Envoy Pro Mini, which features up to 1TB of storage available in 3 configurations. It is a USB 3 (Type A, port, Gen 1) drive, with peak data rates of 450MB/s (read) and 404MB/s (write). The drive is bootable via any Mac that support USB booting, and includes a lanyard and USB extension cable. The Pro Mini is compatible with USB type C ports (including USB 3.1) and Thunderbolt 3 via the optional USB Type A to Type C extension cable. This drive looks like your standard flash/thumb drive, so you might never guess that it’s packing 1TB of data—and at speeds that fast!

The Envoy Pro EX USB-C stores up to 2TB, and offers speeds up to 980MB/s. It’s been given an IP67 rating for dust and water resistance, and is able to withstand 30 minutes in depths of up to 1 meter of water. IP ratings, short for ”Ingress Protection”, are an international standard that helps qualify different levels of protection from intrusion to a drive. They generally are made up of two numbers, the first signifying protection rating against solid intrusions, and the second for liquids.

The Envoy Pro EX USB-C is also capable of direct connection to devices like USB-C cameras, is bus powered, and is completely silent due to its lack of a fan (very important in the studio). It is very compact at just 2.1” wide, 0.4” tall, and 4.45” deep, and weighs in at 5.2oz. The drive is small enough to fit in the palm of my very small hands. It comes with a USB 3.1 cable, is Mac bootable (PC booting is not supported), and is available in multiple capacities.

Last in the trio is the Envoy Pro EX Thunderbolt 3, which boasts a speed of 2500MB/s (made possible by the 40GB/s capability of Thunderbolt 3), and is offered in 2TB (used in this review) and 1TB configurations. This drive is the most rugged of the trio, with a military-grade protection rating of “MIL-STD810G” against things like drops and aggressive jostling. The tests for these ratings were conducted by a 3rd party according to OWC, and included dropping the drive from heights of 4 feet at every angle up to 25 times. I am not brave enough to play hacky sack with a hard drive, but feel free to test this on your own!

The drive runs cool and quiet, is bus powered, and has no moving parts. No AC adapter is required here. OWC has nicknamed this little drive their ”Portable Peak Performer”, and rather rightly so! This would make a fantastic option for those who record on-the-go and need a ton of storage. It comes with a Thunderbolt cable, removable protective bumper, and is available in 3 capacities.
All three of the drives are Mac/PC compatible, and the Pro EX USB-C is also compatible with Linux, Chrome Android, and any other OS that supports USB 3.1 Gen 2. All of the drives also come with a three-year warranty and customer service from OWC.

In Use

One might not normally think of portable drives as part of your studio arsenal, but with this much storage and so much content creation nowadays, it makes sense to consolidate and remain as secure as possible. I gave these drives some testing of my own, adding them to my studio workflow and music production fueled life.

Let’s start with the smallest of the drives, the Envoy Pro Mini. Despite its unassuming size, this drive allowed me to keep a ton of data with me, for example vast quantities of samples and loops—all on something the size of a thumb drive! I like to think of it as a mini forklift, helping me move large things with ease.

While I was advised by the team at OWC that the Pro Mini wasn’t meant to run a session off of, I wanted to try it. I ran a session with one single track of audio—a podcast conversation between two people. I was able to edit audio and play it back just fine, but I did not try recording to it. Editing and playback functioned as expected, which makes it useful for basic audio work while traveling.

I also tried running a couple Ableton sessions with a few VST instruments. Amazingly for a little thumb style drive, the thing actually loaded. While the VSTs were not happy and the session struggled to run a bit, I did get a smaller session comprised of a vocal track and two frozen instrument tracks to play back fine, and was even able to apply some minimal edits.

The best use for the super miniature style of drive however, is for backup storage, and shuttling data from place to place—not running sessions. It allows you to bring your creative components with you to any studio for a writing session, and to safely take away the the fruits of your labor afterwards. It is really unbelievable to see this much storage at this physical size.

As expected, the larger but still compact Envoy Pro EX USB-C ran very smoothly and provided quick access to whatever session I was working on. Large sessions ran just fine off of this drive with no hiccups. While I wasn’t running anything astronomically huge, I did have quite a few VSTs and native plugins running in Ableton across multiple tracks of audio. Copying or moving files between my computer and the drive happened as quickly as if I was merely dragging and dropping a PDF.

The drive’s sleek design made it easy to put in a pocket and go, if needed. I found it reassuring to know that I wouldn’t have to worry if it rained, or if I used the drive in a particularly dusty space. The build quality here is solid, and its nearly seamless metal enclosure has a nice, burnished finish.

Finally, the Envoy Pro Thunderbolt 3 was quite the mini-beast. Throwing just about everything but the kitchen sink at it, it didn’t blink. I was able to move around several sessions in about five seconds. Mind you, we’re not talking documents here—this was a few sessions! Of course, session size and types vary from project to project, but the results here were very impressive.

This is definitely an extremely fast and rugged drive. And although some knocks in a bag would be the least of its concerns, OWC has kindly included an additional durable sleeve, which added a nice extra layer of protection. I found myself not worrying at all if I happened to quickly throw it in my backpack while running out the door.

To Be Critical

It’s really hard to fault the performance of these drives; they function as the quiet, fast, and sleek drives they are meant to be. In the case of the Pro EX Thunderbolt 3, I did feel that the provided cable was a bit short. Unless you are working from a laptop, it’s going to be a little tricky to get this cable to reach anything that is slightly out of the way. For anyone with a tower, you may need to find something to perch it on… or find some sort of extension cable. That said, I really wouldn’t let the length of the cable stop me from using this drive.

The Envoy Pro USB-C is lovely inside and out, though I did wonder why OWC hadn’t included some sort of drawstring pouch for travel. Although it’s got a very good rating for ingress, I still wouldn’t want it to get scratched up.

Summing it Up

There is a lot of value in the peace of mind you get from knowing your data is secure. I’d highly recommend the Envoy series by OWC to anyone who needs fast, reliable—and durable—storage on-the-go and in large quantities. There’s a price point to suit users of all kinds, and a drive to suit just about any type of workflow.

The Envoy Pro Mini starts at $94.95 (the 1TB model reviewed here at $219.75), the Envoy Pro EX w/ USB-C starts at $129.95 (review unit at $499.75), and finally the Envoy Pro EX w/ Thunderbolt 3 starts at $229.95 (review unit at $529.95).

Kallie Marie is a producer, composer and educator who lives in New York.

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