Other World Computing has been in the business of quality accessories and peripherals optimized for Mac for over three decades now, and over the years, the company built a formidable portfolio of high performance products for creative professionals that just work. The Envoy Ultra is no exception. This is a fantastic, high-speed portable SSD that's an ideal pairing for MacBook Pro, Mac Studio, or Mac Pro, particularly for creators dealing with datasets that need rapid transfer rates. This is one of the first fully-built portable SSDs to implement 80 Gbps Thunderbolt 5 and USB V2, a standard that's mostly still nascent on the Windows PC ecosystem, typically needing add-on cards, but is fairly well proliferated in the Apple Mac ecosystem since 2024. The drive takes advantage of the new standard to offer sequential read speeds of over 6 GB/s, something not possible with 40 Gbps USB4 or Thunderbolt 4.

The Envoy Ultra also offers sequential write speeds of over 5 GB/s, but in our sustained write tests that fills the whole disk with data, this 5 GB/s speed is only sustained up to 48 GB written, beyond which the performance drops off a cliff to roughly 1.4 GB/s. This is still high enough for 4K HDR RAW video writing at 60 FPS, so filmmakers should find the drive useful with professional cinema cameras that support 80 Gbps or 40 Gbps USB-C interfaces. The Envoy Ultra also offers high 4K random access performance that should help when you're trying to work with a video production dataset right off the drive.

Our weighted sequential read tests see the OWC Envoy Ultra clock over 4.12 GB/s of sequential speeds, nearly 44% faster than the OWC Express 1M2 2 TB, a 40 Gbps-class portable SSD from the same brand. We are in the process of vastly expanding our USB4 portable SSD bench selection, so you'll find more comparison data in the coming weeks.

Under the hood, the OWC Envoy Ultra is a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure that connects the 80 Gbps upstream interface to an M.2-2280 slot with PCIe Gen 4 x4 wiring. OWC is using its in-house Aura IV Pro SSD. This is a performance-segment Gen 4 drive that uses a DRAMless controller. This is probably where the Envoy Ultra faces its first wrinkle, especially when you consider its $650 price. While the Aura IV Pro is able to let the Envoy Ultra achieve its advertised transfer speeds of "over 6000 MB/s," it is a let-down in write performance, particularly sustained write performance, due to its small SLC cache of just 48 GB. This drive uses 3D TLC NAND flash (and not QLC NAND), and could afford to have a larger portion of its NAND flash user area treated by the controller as SLC for higher sequential write speeds, until it falls back to treating it like TLC. Even when exhausted however, the Envoy Ultra still manages the highest sustained write speeds in our comparison, of 1.4 GB/s.

Installing the OWC Envoy Ultra is as easy as plugging it in. The drive comes with a fixed 80 Gbps-rated type-C cable. There are pros and cons to this approach. You are guaranteed to always have a cable capable of 80 Gbps, since cable quality plays a role in ensuring the PAM3 digital signals of Thunderbolt 5 are reliable between a host and a device. On the flip side, you are limited by its length, and can't replace it with a longer 80 Gbps-rated aftermarket cable. The drive comes pre-formatted in Apple's APFS filesystem, so it's basically plug-and-play for Macs. PC users, however, will need to bring up Disk Management, and format the drive from there to NTFS before being able to use it for the first time. Since the drive is APFS pre-formatted, out of the box, Windows won't even assign a drive letter, so it won't show up in Explorer the first time. There is a QR code that points you to an online manual that provides fairly easy step-by-step tutorials on how to do this. OWC's choice of APFS pre-formatting cannot be faulted because Apple is way ahead of the Windows PC ecosystem in implementing Thunderbolt 5, so OWC is simply catering to a larger market.

Perhaps our biggest gripe with the Envoy Ultra is that it's bulky. This thing is roughly the size of a portable hard drive from the 2000s that used 2.5-inch internal HDDs, and weighs nearly 350 g, or about the weight of two iPhones. The drive is completely fanless, and uses the sheer mass of its aluminium alloy to cool both the Aura IV Pro internal SSD, and the Intel Thunderbolt 5 bridge chip. This could have been a slightly slimmer, lighter drive, considering that the Phison E27T controller powering the Aura IV Pro doesn't run anywhere near as hot as the Phison E18-series 8-channel controllers from the Gen 4 era. The combined thermal load should barely be 10-15 W for the whole drive. That said, all this bulk will come in handy if you decide to upgrade the internal SSD for something faster, like the Samsung 990 Pro or WD Black SN850X.

The OWC Envoy Ultra isn't cheap, with its 2 TB version in this review going for $650, 4 TB version for $900, and 8 TB version for $1,700. These prices are probably because of the ongoing acute shortage of NAND flash chips. The $650 price has a lot of room for improvement when prices come down, considering that aftermarket 2 TB Gen 4 M.2 SSDs based on the Phison E27T, such as the Crucial P310, are normally priced at $200; and considering that Intel significantly lowered the price of its Thunderbolt bridge chips, with the JHL9480 spot-priced at just $20, with the Infineon EZ-PD at another $5. For now, given that 80 Gbps portable SSDs are fairly rare, and fanless ones rarer still, despite the price the OWC Envoy Ultra is a fantastic, well-rounded product that should elevate your production experience on a Mac.