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Review: OWC's Envoy Pro FX is an Ultra Fast, Expensive Portable SSD for Macs
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You've got some good points but you seem to forget that not all ssd's are the same, Apple uses MLC ssd's, most cheaper drives are TLC or QLC, makes quite the difference price wise.
Yep! I just bought one of these Glyph Atom Pro 4TB Thunderbolt drives for my new M1 Macbook Pro and the combination of the two of them is screaming fast for my film scoring and video editing work!
I've read that the X5 has cooling issues and throttles down when hot? Whats been your experience?
This is what I've also read in the past year or so....which is why I've held off on these drives.
I wonder if current pricing has to do with the pandemic and other chip shortages?
It took a long time for HDDs to reach the level of affordability they are now.
Someone has exactly the data I was looking for: HDD prices over the years
According to the above and my assessment, 2009 was the first year a HDD with a capacity to satisfy the average user's demand wasn't beyond their budget. For Apple customers (i.e., accounting for the upgrade pricing premium) I'd estimate that period didn't begin until 2014.
😆🙁
This is correct. The heat dissipation from the enclosure is rather poor, so when the drive heats up, the SSD throttles - in extreme cases you get less then half the original speed!
I ended up returning the X5 and went with a Glyph Atom Pro instead.
Ive had an Envoy Pro in the past (not the newest FX version) and that was also rather good with heat dissipation. These all aluminium bodies do a great job!
Hmm, I've always been able to add other memory to my iMacs. My most recent machine is just about a year old and I ordered it with the minimum memory and then replaced it with OWC.
But more expensive than plastic.
The OWC units are well built, small, stay cool. And if you don’t need the speed of this solution (most don’t) the lower priced versions are super fast even booting up and running a system using USB3.
We do reviews frequently. This is no different. There is no payment or advertising involved.
See: https://www.macrumors.com/review/
It does support TRIM, according to the product page: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-envoy-pro-fx
In all honesty I never pretended to be a complete SSD expert and I didn't know what TRIM is, so I didn't mention it.
I'd argue this is semantics, at least partially. Apple advertises its MacBooks as having Thunderbolt 3 ports, for example. That said, I've revised this for clarity. Thank you.
I haven't upgraded yet, sorry
It surprises me that the bandwidth isn't common. I should've known there was a catch anyway.
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Yep, that's what I mean. OWC has good solutions but you can build your own at much cheaper prices and have the same or better performance. I get every company has to profit but....
Just a non-sequitur wish - I hope that some of the SSD makers realize that making SSD with larger volume would still be very attractive if it ran slower but still much faster than a standard mechanical drive. Drive the cost down by not having to make it run as fast as other SSD drives. Consider slower SSD for RAID set ups that can be twice as fast as typical hard drive under RAID 10, 5, 6 etc.
EVERY OWC SSD enclosure I have ever used has had mounting and write failures. Will never buy any of their crap again.
I had a 2012 Mini where I put in 2 OWC SSD. One failed within 9 weeks. Fortunately, I had a back up and was able to continue on the remaining drive. I know it can happen to any given drive but I too felt a bit shy of trusting them again. These days, I see some items of OWC that are still winners and some I think I'll find an alternative product.
I've got an Envoy Pro EX (previous generation to this) that has been my boot drive for the ~year and I've not had a problem. I do my misc file storage on an OWC Elite Pro duo with RAIDed pair of Samsung SATA SSD's and it's been no trouble. My clones go to a 4 TB WD drive in an OWC drive dock that's not given me any issues. OWC had some problems and they weren't dealt with well but they've got their HW suppliers locked down and finally either wrote or bought some decent SW.
Thank you for the update, here's a two minute guide to what TRIM does. SSDs differ from HDDs in several major ways, relevant to TRIM are: An SSD can't just write data, it needs to first erase and then write. Unlike HDDs that can generally read and write every sector individually, SSDs have much larger minimal units for erasing and writing that cover many sectors. Unlike HDDs that can write every sector essentially an unlimited number of times an SSD can only do about 100000 cycles (erase and write) for early SLC, and only about 1000 cycles for modern cheap QLC.
That's why SSDs do wear levelling, i.e. instead of having a (mostly) 1:1 mapping of logical sector number to physical sector number an SSD maintains a mapping table from logical sectors to physical ones, and will keep track of how often each physical block was already erased and/or written. If one part of the SSD is written to more often than others it will map those logical sectors to a different physical block that hasn't yet been written to as frequently, thereby levelling the playing field.
Complicating this procedure is the fact that a block contains many sectors, not all of which will contain valid data, some of them will be empty. That's why wear levelling is coupled with "garbage collection", where for example while remapping data for wear levelling, for example the used sectors of two half-full more worn-out blocks can and will be written to one newly selected less worn out block, thereby using only one block instead of two and freeing one for a new erase-write cycle of which the first step is an erase of the entire block.
Now how does the SSD know which sectors are garbage, i.e. the contents don't need to be saved during garbage collection? If a sector was never written it's garbage. If a sector was overwritten and the new sector written to a different physical position then the old version of the sector can be marked as garbage. The SSD know when this happens because it's a write to the same logical sector number and it itself is responsible for the mapping to physical locations. The final way for data to become garbage is when a file is deleted or a drive is formatted and all the affected data becomes garbage. However the SSD doesn't know when that happens, and doesn't know what data became garbage, and that's exactly what TRIM is for. Via TRIM the OS can tell the SSD which sectors are now garbage so that its garbage collection knows about all the garbage and spends less time, space, energy and erase-write cycles on keeping it and moving it around.
In other words people claiming that SSDs don't need TRIM because of garbage collection are dangerously half right seeing as TRIM is an important part of letting the drive know what is garbage, thereby being an important, albeit optional, part of said garbage collection.
Really? Then it must be a dream that I have an external TB3 enclosure hooked to my M1 Mac Mini that I bought from Newegg for $71 and put my own SSD in.
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That’s at over $100 now and is ugly, clunky and made of plastic.
That’s fine. But if you held one of these preassembled OWC units in one hand and your in the other, you would see the difference.
But they sell a roll-your-own T3 case for about the same price you paid:
OWC Express 1M2 - The Fastest Single Portable SSD We Offer
Ultra-fast, compatible, and reliable portable USB4 NVMe SSD with speeds up to 3836MB/s. Build your own or choose ready-to-run solutions for your Mac or PC.
eshop.macsales.com
I don’t work for OWC, but have been buying from them for decades. Pretty reliable stuff. Although the RAID FW800 cases didn’t last as long as I would have hoped, everything else still works.
That’s at over $100 now and is ugly, clunky and made of plastic.
That’s fine. But if you held one of these preassembled OWC units in one hand and your in the other, you would see the difference.
But they sell a roll-your-own T3 case for about the same price you paid:
And it’s black anodized aluminum, not clear acrylic with an ugly heat sink.OWC Express 1M2 - The Fastest Single Portable SSD We Offer
Ultra-fast, compatible, and reliable portable USB4 NVMe SSD with speeds up to 3836MB/s. Build your own or choose ready-to-run solutions for your Mac or PC.
I don’t work for OWC, but have been buying from them for decades. Pretty reliable stuff. Although the RAID FW800 cases didn’t last as long as I would have hoped, everything else still works.
There’s my Envoy Pro EX virtually indistinguishable from the Mac Mini it’s attached to
Agreed. Not sure why 4TB isn’t an option as people would definitely pay for it. I just got a new 2tb Mac mini and eventually the time machine will be full. Samsung has 8tb drives now. They’re just not as fast and run a bit hot.