OWC claims its USB-C SSD is the fastest yet
OWC might have your back if you want the speediest external drive you can get without sacrificing too much in the way of portability or price. The company claims that its new Envoy Pro EX is the fastest USB-C SSD on the planet, with its NVMe-based storage offering transfer speeds as high as 980MB/s — for context, even SanDisk’s Extreme 900 Portable SSD peaks at 850MB/s in ideal conditions. It’s a drive that could handle 4K video editing one moment and sit in your pocket the next.
The drive also ticks other checkboxes, including IP67 dust and water resistance, direct connections to cameras, and a quiet, completely bus-powered design. It starts at $89 for an enclosure-only model and $129 for a 250GB version, but it scales up to a $430 2TB model if you need copious amounts of included storage.
This doesn’t make it the fastest drive full stop. Numerous Thunderbolt 3 drives easily outperform the Envoy Pro EX, and they’ll be better for users who insist on performance comparable to a good internal SSD. Not all of those are as slim as OWC’s drive, though, and they’re often much more expensive (Samsung’s 1TB drive is on sale for $500 as we write this). Consider this a balanced drive that makes relatively few compromises rather than a record-setter.
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