Sometimes you run out of space on your MacBook or PC. The first option is usually an external hard drive or SSD. The biggest concern with doing this is losing out on the read and write speed you grow accustomed to. Thankfully there is an option where speed and size are whatever you want it to be.
The OWC Envoy Express is the world’s first Thunderbolt 3 certified, bus-powered, ‘add your own drive’ enclosure. Anytime I hear “worlds first” my ears perk up. So what makes this OWC Envoy Express a go-to for anyone looking to expand their memory? Well, it is future-proof. Sure maybe one day 20 years down the road it will seem like a floppy disk, but we’re talking Ready Player One future at that point. The Envoy express is a slick black anodized aluminum housing that fits any NVMe M.2 2280 SSDs. That means it will fit any that are available today and any available in the future.
NVMe M.2 SSDs come in multiple sizes so it is honestly whatever you need or want. It is nice to know that the Envoy Express will work for whatever you want. Do you need 1 TB or 4 TB? In the future maybe we will have an NVMe M.2 that is 50 TB. If so the Envoy Express will work. The Envoy also supports up to 1553MB/s but will also depend varying on the user-installed drive.
One interesting choice is the optional slide mount feature they have added to the housing. It is a surface-safe removable mount that you can place on the back of your laptop’s screen so that the drive won’t get in the way. As someone who likes the sleek clean look of the MacBook, I’m not sure I will be using it. But hey, I always love options so shoutout to OWC for at least thinking of a mount.
I’m one of those individuals who have a work MacBook Pro and a gaming PC I built for my home use. Sometimes I do enjoy working on my PC more for certain things. Thankfully with the choice of using a Thunderbolt 3, I can quickly plug in the Envoy Express to my PC and quickly finish whatever I was working on on my Macbook.
If I had to knock the Envoy express anywhere it would be a lack of ports. With MacBook’s concern on minimalism, there are some extra ports I always need. I know OWC went for the sleek build, but I would have loved some USB ports and an HDMI port. Most of the time I have so many dongles on my MacBook it looks like a Frankenstein machine. So cleaning that up is always a plus for me.
Currently, the OWC Envoy Express is $79.00 on Amazon. If your someone who has to have the highest read-write speeds while being able to choose what storage size you want I think the Envoy Express is what you need. This way as technology evolves you to can evolve with it.