Test Setup

Windows 11 settings has a neat feature under the section "USB4 Hubs and Devices" which lets you verify if a USB4 or Thunderbolt device is properly negotiated for its rated bandwidth. Here, you can see that the OWC Envoy Ultra 2 TB, connected to our ASUS ThunderboltEX 5 add-on card, is correctly configured for 80 Gbps bandwidth as a USB4 V2 device. OWC also asks you to enable "Better Performance" disk policy.

Out of the box, the drive comes pre-formatted in Apple's APFS file-system, so Windows PCs won't list the drive in Explorer. You are supposed to use Disk Management to format the drive in NTFS, so Windows can properly mount the drive with a drive letter.


In the next page, you will see measurements for "OWC Express 1M2 2 TB." We never had a chance to test this drive, but rather we moved the Aura Pro IV 2 TB internal SSD from the Envoy Ultra to the Express 1M2 0 GB enclosure and put the contraption through our entire bench. OWC uses the Aura Pro IV in its variants of the Express 1M2 that come with pre-installed SSDs, so this is a fairly accurate representation.