OWC Envoy Ultra 2TB Thunderbolt 5 SSD Review – Lightning Speed ​​Creators

Introduction

The Other World Computing (OWC) Envoy Ultra is a premium portable SSD for smart professionals on the go, who use large amounts of data to transfer at speeds that rival internal SSDs. This drive is roughly the size, shape, and weight of a 2.5-inch portable hard drive from the 2000s, but with at least 60 times the transfer speed and better latency due to being flash-based. The drive uses the latest Thunderbolt 5 and USB4 V2 interfaces, with a bandwidth of 80 Gbps in each direction. We have a 2 TB version of it, but the drive also comes in 4 TB and 8 TB.

OWC has decades of experience making hardware, accessories, and development kits for Apple Macs, so the brand is very popular among the creative professional community. The company is also known for its first-party online store, Macsales, a destination for Mac users to find gear they know has been designed and tested to work with their Apple products. Since Apple is ahead of most Windows PC OEMs in implementing Thunderbolt 5 across its MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, and Mac Studio lines, the OWC Envoy Ultra comes pre-formatted in APFS, you must format it in NTFS to use it on a Windows PC. That’s how OWC knows its customers.

Unlike many other OWC products in the category that come in Apple’s favorite silver-aluminum shade, the OWC Envoy Ultra in our review is designed to match the Macs aesthetic with the Space Black color scheme. The enclosure is made of aluminum alloy as a whole, and its design allows the transfer of heat from your internal parts to the rest of the body, the cooling effect. OWC has also designed the drive’s LED to face down, with the right amount of light, so even if it blinks to indicate activity, it doesn’t look distracting sitting on a desk.

An interesting design choice with the Envoy Ultra is its fixed (captive) Thunderbolt 5 cable, which means the cable is attached to the drive and cannot be removed. This is probably done to ensure that the correct type of cable is used with the drive at all times. Portable storage devices of this size, such as portable HDDs, have shipped with enclosed cables in the past, so this may not be the norm, however, this limits the customer’s choice in case they want an aftermarket cable that is slightly longer than the 20 cm (8-inch) cable offered by OWC.

Thunderbolt 5 reaches 80 Gbps per direction due to PAM3 signaling unlike the 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 4, which uses NRZ signaling. Although the two connections are pin-to-pin, the quality of the cable plays a role in ensuring that PAM3 signals are reliable between the host and the connected device. Thunderbolt 5 devices are designed to test the cable’s strength when plugged in, and fall back to 40 Gbps if it doesn’t report Thunderbolt 5 readiness. That’s probably why OWC provided the Envoy Ultra with a captive cable that’s certified to support the advertised speed of 80 Gbps when connected to a Thunderbolt 5 host.

We tested the OWC Envoy Ultra 2 TB on a Windows 11 PC with an ASUS ThunderboltEX 5 add-in card that provides Thunderbolt 5 and USB4 V2 ports. This setup allows us to use our standard SSD for a test drive. We had to manually format it to NTFS, and use the “best performance” drive policy in Windows, as the in-box instructions say.

OWC is asking $650 for the Envoy Ultra 2 TB, which we’re reviewing today. The 4 TB variant is priced at $1,080, and the 8 TB variant at $1,900. All models are backed by a five-year product warranty, the highest for portable storage devices.