The OWC Envoy Pro Elektron (starts at $99.99 for 240GB; $399.99 for 2TB as tested) is a tiny, highly portable external solid-state drive with an attractive design. It's also one of the most ruggedized general-purpose drives we've encountered, able to withstand a dunk in water or exposure to a sandy or dusty environment. Its performance test scores were solid, as is typical of USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives. The Envoy Pro Elektron is on the pricey side and its warranty could be longer, but it's money well spent if you tend to subject your gear to more abuse than you should.
Attractive and Clever Design
At 0.5 by 3 by 2 inches (HWD) and 3 ounces, the Elektron is petite and lightweight, yet this handsome aluminum drive feels very solid. It's not quite as small and light as two Editors' Choice award winners: the Kingston XS2000, which measures 0.5 by 2.7 by 1.3 inches (HWD) and weighs barely an ounce, and the ADATA SE800 (0.4 by 2.8 by 1.7 inches, 1.4 ounces). It has a matte silver-colored frame with rounded corners. The top, which bears the OWC Elektron name and logo, is longer and wider than the bottom. Starting halfway down, three of the sides are beveled inward to the base, which has a thin rubber traction strip on either end.
One of the Elektron's short sides has a status LED, a thin stripe that glows blue when the drive is connected and pulses when a data transfer or other action is in progress. The other short side houses a USB Type-C port, conveniently identified as supporting USB 3.2 Gen 2, labeled as "USB 3.2 10Gb/s." Inside the case is a short (Type-2242, 42mm long) M.2 NVMe solid-state drive, the OWC Aura P13 Pro, which connects to the USB interface using an ASMedia ASM2362 bridge chip. You need a compatible computer to get the speed benefit of this USB flavor. The Elektron comes with a two-foot USB-C cable, which includes a removable USB Type-C-to-A adapter for the computer end, in case your PC lacks a USB-C port.
The Elektron comes preformatted with the exFAT file system, making it usable out of the box with Windows, macOS, and Android machines. The SanDisk Professional G-Drive SSD is even more Mac-friendly, formatted in HFS+ (a.k.a. macOS Extended or Journaled), one of two formats (along with APFS) that you can use for Time Machine backups. Windows can't read HFS+, however, and it can be tricky to reformat if you don't have a Mac, so unless you plan to use a drive exclusively with a Mac, exFAT is a better choice.
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Built to Withstand the Elements
The sturdy Elektron's Ingress Protection (IP) rating of IP67 tells us it's been certified both dustproof and waterproof, the latter to a depth of three feet for up to 30 minutes. This matches the IP rating of the SanDisk Professional G-Drive SSD. Only one consumer-level SSD we've reviewed—the ADATA SE800—has a higher (IP68) rating, as it is slightly more watertight.
As of this writing, the prices for the Elektron's different capacities are the same whether buying from Amazon or direct from OWC. The Elektron matches the SanDisk Professional G-Drive SSD's 23 cents per gigabyte in the 1TB capacity but costs a bit more than that drive's 18 cents per gig for its 2TB version. The ADATA SE800's capacity maxes out at 1TB, for which the list price comes to 26 cents per gigabyte, although it's often discounted to as low as half that price. The 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2 lists at 25 cents per gigabyte, while the 2TB model lists at 23 cents a gig.
OWC covers the Elektron with a modest three-year warranty. This matches the three years offered by the ADATA SE800 and the Samsung Portable SSD T7, but it falls short of the five years of coverage you get with the two SanDisk SSDs, the 2020 iteration of the WD My Passport SSD, and many other drives.
Testing the OWC Elektron: No Surprises
We test external SSDs using PC Labs' main storage testbed, which is built on an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard with an Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition CPU. The system has 16GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz and employs an Nvidia GeForce discrete graphics card.
We subjected the Elektron to our usual suite of benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, BlackMagic's Disk Speed Test, and our own folder transfer test. The first two are run on a PC with the drive formatted in NTFS, and the latter two on a 2016 MacBook Pro using exFAT. Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. The PCMark 10 Storage test measures an SSD's readiness for a wide variety of everyday tasks.
The Elektron's sequential read and write scores as measured by Crystal DiskMark are a hair short of its rated speeds and typical of USB 3.2 Gen 2 external drives, which generally fall in a narrow range around 1,000MBps for both read and write. The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2 had the highest read and write scores in this test, but the difference between its and the OWC's scores is minimal compared with that between any USB 3.2 Gen 2 drive and any SATA drive—with read and write scores around 500MBps or less—or any USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drive, with scores pushing 2,000MBps for both read and write. A glance at our Crystal DiskMark chart should be all you need to figure out which bus each drive is using. In fact, the only anomaly among the USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives in our test group was the unusually low write score turned in by the ADATA SE800. (Fortunately, it had a saving grace, the extreme durability and ruggedness that helped earn it Editors' Choice honors.)
The situation was similar with the BlackMagic read and write tests (although since our Mac testbed only supports USB 3.2 Gen 2, all the scores except for the SATA-based HP P500 are clustered a bit below 1,000MBps). As is typical of USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives, the Envoy Pro Elektron's BlackMagic scores fell slightly short of its Crystal DiskMark results.
The Elektron's PCMark 10 overall score is on the low side, trailing six of our nine comparison drives including both USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Gen 2x2 models. (The other comparison drives that you see in this review's charts were tested using an earlier version of PCMark 10 and are omitted from this chart as the results are not compatible.) Still, its score is well within normal parameters.
Its score of two seconds in our stopwatch transfer test is typical—all of our comparison drives except the HP P500 were within a second of that.
An SSD for Wilderness Types
There's a lot to like about the OWC Envoy Pro Elektron, including its easy portability and metal frame that provides protection from water, dust, and sand. It demonstrated solid performance in our testing. We wish it had a five-year warranty like the SanDisk Professional G-Drive SSD and some other competitors, but even as is, it's an attractive and compact drive that's a great choice, especially for people whose work or lifestyle keeps them outdoors a lot.
The OWC Envoy Pro Elektron costs more than many similar external SSDs (and has a shorter warranty), but it has a sleek, ruggedized frame and posted solid speed numbers in our testing.
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