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The Envoy Pro FX enclosure is equipped with OWC's Aura P12 Pro, a high-performance SSD with M.2 NVMe 1.3 technology. With a PCI-Express 3.1 connection via Thunderbolt 3, OWC promises impressive read/write speeds up to 2,800 MB/s.
Flexible Compatibility: Plug & play with past, present and future Macs, Windows and Linux PCs, iPad Pros, Chromebooks, and Surface devices But how did the drive handle our performance-testing regimen? Let's move onto the benchmarks... The Fastest Available?
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. 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.
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. 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.Sequential read/write (max) performance based on testing an OWC Aura Pro III equipped Envoy Pro Elektron connected to an iMac Pro Late 2017 (iMacPro1,1) with 32GB RAM and 3.2GHz processor running AJA System Test (4K-Full resolution, 64GB file size, 10bit RGB codec, single file test) and Diglloyd DiskTester (fill-volume test). 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. But in our testing, we never got above 1,000MB/s, either reading or writing. By selecting 0Fill mode of CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4 and using the highly optimistic Default mode, we only saw 928MB/s reading and 861MB/s writes.
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