OWC Envoy Express is a Thunderbolt-certified DIY NVME SSD enclosure

AppleInsider · June 25, 2020 3:15PM

Long-time Mac upgrade vendor OWC has released the Envoy Express -- a bus-powered, Thunderbolt certified enclosure for M.2 SSDs, at an affordable price.

OWC's new Thunderbolt 3 Envoy Express M.2 drive enclosure

OWC's Envoy Express allows users to insert their own M.2 2280 SSD into a first-of-its-kind Thunderbolt-certified enclosure. Additionally, the enclosure comes with a temporary adhesive mount, so it can be attached to the back of a MacBook Pro or iMac for convenience.

Drives in the enclosure can deliver up to 1553 megabytes per second real-world performance. The Thunderbolt 3 cable is a standard one, with an internal connector, held in place by the enclosure, and easily replaceable if it breaks.

OWC says that the enclosure is ready to go for any M.2 2280 drive now. Future sizes are supported "without limit" according to the company,

The OWC Envoy Express retails for $79.99. It is presently up for pre-order at a discount, with early purchases available for $68.00.

bsbeamer · June 25, 2020 3:33PM

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market. Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

sflocal · June 25, 2020 3:44PM

bsbeamer said:

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market. Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

Yes, and those I have deemed as too unreliable, with quality issues, thermal issues, firmware issues, and sketchy compatibility issues with flavors of MacOS. I’ve been wanting an external, portable TB drive but nothing on the market provided me with a comfortable feeling.

hope this one does.

tmay · June 25, 2020 3:58PM

sflocal said:

bsbeamer said:

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market. Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

Yes, and those I have deemed as too unreliable, with quality issues, thermal issues, firmware issues, and sketchy compatibility issues with flavors of MacOS. I’ve been wanting an external, portable TB drive but nothing on the market provided me with a comfortable feeling.

hope this one does.

So, I have a 2014 iMac with Fusion drive. and i'm wondering if it would make sense to use something like the linked device above as a boot drive.

edited June 2020

rcfa · June 25, 2020 3:58PM

Will this work, at slower speeds of course, when attached to a USB port, or must this be a TB port?

rem#1 · June 25, 2020 4:01PM

What is the sizes & cost of the SSD that can be put into the device?

bsbeamer · June 25, 2020 4:13PM

rcfa said:

Will this work, at slower speeds of course, when attached to a USB port, or must this be a TB port?

TB only. If you want USB-C, look at Plugable. They're 10Gbps and usually around 900MB/s with NVMe.

sflocal · June 25, 2020 4:34PM

rcfa said:

Will this work, at slower speeds of course, when attached to a USB port, or must this be a TB port?

No. It’s a TB3 drive, not USB.

rob53 · June 25, 2020 4:58PM

tmay said:

sflocal said:

bsbeamer said:

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market. Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

Yes, and those I have deemed as too unreliable, with quality issues, thermal issues, firmware issues, and sketchy compatibility issues with flavors of MacOS. I’ve been wanting an external, portable TB drive but nothing on the market provided me with a comfortable feeling.

hope this one does.

So, I have a 2014 iMac with Fusion drive. and i'm wondering if it would make sense to use something like the linked device above as a boot drive.

I have a 2015 iMac and it only has TB2 along with a Fusion drive.

From MacSales: Besides being the industry’s first Thunderbolt™ 3 bus powered (no power adapter required) enclosure... 1553MB/s performance based on testing a 2.0TB OWC Aura Pro P12 equipped Envoy Express

I'm not sure if the Apple TB2 to TB3 adapter works as a powered port. I have the adapter but it's connected to a TB3 RAID, which is powered.

The SSD blade used in the photo doesn't match the photos used by MacSales for either their 6G or NVMe blades so I'm not sure which blade they're actually using. The NVMe blade, https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/S3DN3P2T20/, is rated at 3400/3000MB/s so this enclosure doesn't use the full speed interface like their Envoy Pro EX which has 2500MB/s speeds. The 1500 is nothing to complain about but you might not get that speed using TB2. I presume the internal port is a USB-C, which your iMac doesn't have.

Even though I only have a TB2 iMac I'm going to go ahead and get the enclosure and check it's speed when connected to my TB3 RAID (connected to my iMac using Apple's adapter). Pricing for their Envoy Pro EX, 2TB model is $499.75 while their 2TB NVMe card is $348.99, add the $68 for the enclosure and it's $416.99, a good savings but it is slower than the Pro E, which doesn't work with the Apple adapter (confirmed by MacSales).

Ordered: expected delivery August 2020

edited June 2020

tmay · June 25, 2020 5:12PM

rob53 said:

tmay said:

sflocal said:

bsbeamer said:

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market. Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

Yes, and those I have deemed as too unreliable, with quality issues, thermal issues, firmware issues, and sketchy compatibility issues with flavors of MacOS. I’ve been wanting an external, portable TB drive but nothing on the market provided me with a comfortable feeling.

hope this one does.

So, I have a 2014 iMac with Fusion drive. and i'm wondering if it would make sense to use something like the linked device above as a boot drive.

I have a 2015 iMac and it only has TB2 along with a Fusion drive.

From MacSales: Besides being the industry’s first Thunderbolt™ 3 bus powered (no power adapter required) enclosure... 1553MB/s performance based on testing a 2.0TB OWC Aura Pro P12 equipped Envoy Express

I'm not sure if the Apple TB2 to TB3 adapter works as a powered port. I have the adapter but it's connected to a TB3 RAID, which is powered.

The SSD blade used in the photo doesn't match the photos used by MacSales for either their 6G or NVMe blades so I'm not sure which blade they're actually using. The NVMe blade, https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/S3DN3P2T20/, is rated at 3400/3000MB/s so this enclosure doesn't use the full speed interface like their Envoy Pro EX which has 2500MB/s speeds. The 1500 is nothing to complain about but you might not get that speed using TB2. I presume the internal port is a USB-C, which your iMac doesn't have.

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

It definitely looks like a TB3 configuration requires more kludges than what I would be interested in, but a TB2 device would not have as useful a life, in my opinion, on some future TB3/USB 4 machine either.

I'm looking to Apple to have an Apple Silicon powered iMac before mine becomes unsupported, so I'll likely just pass on an external SSD.

sflocal · June 25, 2020 5:23PM

rob53 said:

tmay said:

sflocal said:

bsbeamer said:

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market. Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

Yes, and those I have deemed as too unreliable, with quality issues, thermal issues, firmware issues, and sketchy compatibility issues with flavors of MacOS. I’ve been wanting an external, portable TB drive but nothing on the market provided me with a comfortable feeling.

hope this one does.

So, I have a 2014 iMac with Fusion drive. and i'm wondering if it would make sense to use something like the linked device above as a boot drive.

I have a 2015 iMac and it only has TB2 along with a Fusion drive.

From MacSales: Besides being the industry’s first Thunderbolt™ 3 bus powered (no power adapter required) enclosure... 1553MB/s performance based on testing a 2.0TB OWC Aura Pro P12 equipped Envoy Express

I'm not sure if the Apple TB2 to TB3 adapter works as a powered port. I have the adapter but it's connected to a TB3 RAID, which is powered.

The SSD blade used in the photo doesn't match the photos used by MacSales for either their 6G or NVMe blades so I'm not sure which blade they're actually using. The NVMe blade, https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/S3DN3P2T20/, is rated at 3400/3000MB/s so this enclosure doesn't use the full speed interface like their Envoy Pro EX which has 2500MB/s speeds. The 1500 is nothing to complain about but you might not get that speed using TB2. I presume the internal port is a USB-C, which your iMac doesn't have.

Even though I only have a TB2 iMac I'm going to go ahead and get the enclosure and check it's speed when connected to my TB3 RAID (connected to my iMac using Apple's adapter). Pricing for their Envoy Pro EX, 2TB model is $499.75 while their 2TB NVMe card is $348.99, add the $68 for the enclosure and it's $416.99, a good savings but it is slower than the Pro E, which doesn't work with the Apple adapter (confirmed by MacSales).

Ordered: expected delivery August 2020

Thunderbolt2's 20gb/s bandwidth = 2.5GB/s. TB3's 40gb/s = 5GB/s. Granted, OWC's 1.5GB/s is still extremely fast for an external drive, I wonder if the bottleneck is the SSD drive itself, and not the enclosure. The Samsung 970 Evo is rated at 3.5GB/s read and 2.5GB/s write. Will this enclosure not utilize that speed if I use that SSD? I hate these kind of uncertainties.

I'm curing about your setup. Your 2015 iMac has a TB2 interface, yet you're using a TB3 RAID array? What adapter are you using? Apple's adapter allows TB2 devices (like the Thunderbolt monitors I use) to connect to a TB3 system. Not the other other way around like yours. Can you explain your method? I'm been looking for such a solution.

neilm · June 25, 2020 5:47PM

bsbeamer said:

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market. Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

The article doesn't claim this to be the first; it says it's the first certified.

aderutter · June 25, 2020 5:50PM

I'm curing about your setup. Your 2015 iMac has a TB2 interface, yet you're using a TB3 RAID array? What adapter are you using? Apple's adapter allows TB2 devices (like the Thunderbolt monitors I use) to connect to a TB3 system. Not the other other way around like yours. Can you explain your method? I'm been looking for such a solution.

The Apple adaptor is bidirectional.

“The Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter lets you connect Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 devices — such as external hard drives and Thunderbolt docks — to any of the Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports on your MacBook Pro.

As a bidirectional adapter, it can also connect new Thunderbolt 3 devices to a Mac with a Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2 port and macOS Sierra or later.”

sflocal · June 25, 2020 5:56PM

aderutter said:

I'm curing about your setup. Your 2015 iMac has a TB2 interface, yet you're using a TB3 RAID array? What adapter are you using? Apple's adapter allows TB2 devices (like the Thunderbolt monitors I use) to connect to a TB3 system. Not the other other way around like yours. Can you explain your method? I'm been looking for such a solution.

The Apple adaptor is bidirectional.

“The Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter lets you connect Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 devices — such as external hard drives and Thunderbolt docks — to any of the Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports on your MacBook Pro.
As a bidirectional adapter, it can also connect new Thunderbolt 3 devices to a Mac with a Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2 port and macOS Sierra or later.”

I had a complete brain-fart. I'm so conditioned to using the TB3>TB2 adapter on the back of the computer itself, it didn't dawn on me that I simply reverse it and connect it to the back of the device, and use a TB2 cable.

That's a serious face-palm. Thanks for clarifying that. Makes total sense now.

rob53 · June 25, 2020 6:14PM

sflocal said:

rob53 said:

tmay said:

sflocal said:

bsbeamer said:

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market. Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

Yes, and those I have deemed as too unreliable, with quality issues, thermal issues, firmware issues, and sketchy compatibility issues with flavors of MacOS. I’ve been wanting an external, portable TB drive but nothing on the market provided me with a comfortable feeling.

hope this one does.

So, I have a 2014 iMac with Fusion drive. and i'm wondering if it would make sense to use something like the linked device above as a boot drive.

I have a 2015 iMac and it only has TB2 along with a Fusion drive.

From MacSales: Besides being the industry’s first Thunderbolt™ 3 bus powered (no power adapter required) enclosure... 1553MB/s performance based on testing a 2.0TB OWC Aura Pro P12 equipped Envoy Express

I'm not sure if the Apple TB2 to TB3 adapter works as a powered port. I have the adapter but it's connected to a TB3 RAID, which is powered.

The SSD blade used in the photo doesn't match the photos used by MacSales for either their 6G or NVMe blades so I'm not sure which blade they're actually using. The NVMe blade, https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/S3DN3P2T20/, is rated at 3400/3000MB/s so this enclosure doesn't use the full speed interface like their Envoy Pro EX which has 2500MB/s speeds. The 1500 is nothing to complain about but you might not get that speed using TB2. I presume the internal port is a USB-C, which your iMac doesn't have.

Even though I only have a TB2 iMac I'm going to go ahead and get the enclosure and check it's speed when connected to my TB3 RAID (connected to my iMac using Apple's adapter). Pricing for their Envoy Pro EX, 2TB model is $499.75 while their 2TB NVMe card is $348.99, add the $68 for the enclosure and it's $416.99, a good savings but it is slower than the Pro E, which doesn't work with the Apple adapter (confirmed by MacSales).

Ordered: expected delivery August 2020

Thunderbolt2's 20gb/s bandwidth = 2.5GB/s. TB3's 40gb/s = 5GB/s. Granted, OWC's 1.5GB/s is still extremely fast for an external drive, I wonder if the bottleneck is the SSD drive itself, and not the enclosure. The Samsung 970 Evo is rated at 3.5GB/s read and 2.5GB/s write. Will this enclosure not utilize that speed if I use that SSD? I hate these kind of uncertainties.

I'm curing about your setup. Your 2015 iMac has a TB2 interface, yet you're using a TB3 RAID array? What adapter are you using? Apple's adapter allows TB2 devices (like the Thunderbolt monitors I use) to connect to a TB3 system. Not the other other way around like yours. Can you explain your method? I'm been looking for such a solution.

See response from @Aderutter above (edited after your response came before mine). The Apple TB 2-3 is bidirectional. I bout MacSales Thunderbay mini with four HDD to use for backup. I got the TB3 version since it was on sale and will work on newer computers. The HDDs are worthless because I can't do RAID with APFS, at least not until macOS 10.16 or 11. These devices use SoftRAID, which is now owned by MacSales. Remember this RAID software from years ago? It's still around. I shouldn't have been cheap, purchasing OWC's 6G SSD which can use RAID 4 supposedly with APFS but can't confirm this. Problem is, what I have is an almost unusable RAID except for its powered TB3 ports. Live and learn. OWC's NVMe blades are actually less expensive than their older 6G SSD drives but the NVMe blades do require a proper enclosure. I haven't found an empty enclosure but they contain four slots, which can be managed by SoftRAID. Since this is an OWC/MacSales article, I'll reference one product and price. 4TB ThunderBlade, powered enclosure, https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3TBV4T04/ Stripe two or more blades and you can achieve the maximum speed of the NVMe blades. Look at the Compatibility tab and it lists iMacs back into 2014 when using the Apple TB2 to TB3 adapter. This would be a really nice 4TB drive but it can't serve as the boot disk unless you leave one blade out of the RAID, striping the other three. You should be able to boot off the single blade, making for a very fast, 1TB, boot drive on older TB2 Macs while being instantly usable on TB3 Macs.

I'm also considering opening up my Fusion iMac and replacing the blade with a 1TB official Apple blade (I found an Apple certified repair source in CA for used ones), removing my HDD or replacing it with a 6G SSD for iTunes storage. Now that Apple has announced the AS Mac (what about ASM or ASMac as the acronym, maybe ASiM) I'll wait but upgrading my 2015 iMac would make it usable for many people for at least a few more years.

edited June 2020

bsbeamer · June 25, 2020 6:28PM

neilm said:

bsbeamer said:

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market. Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

The article doesn't claim this to be the first; it says it's the first certified.

Image: https://forums.appleinsider.com/uploads/editor/15/on3uvqnf0ssv.png

Their website does.

rob53 · June 25, 2020 6:39PM

bsbeamer said:

neilm said:

bsbeamer said:

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market. Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

The article doesn't claim this to be the first; it says it's the first certified.

Their website does.

Where'd you find your image? Here's what my page shows and it says certified.

sflocal · June 25, 2020 7:19PM

rob53 said:

See response from @Aderutter above (edited after your response came before mine). The Apple TB 2-3 is bidirectional. I bout MacSales Thunderbay mini with four HDD to use for backup. I got the TB3 version since it was on sale and will work on newer computers. The HDDs are worthless because I can't do RAID with APFS, at least not until macOS 10.16 or 11. These devices use SoftRAID, which is now owned by MacSales. Remember this RAID software from years ago? It's still around. I shouldn't have been cheap, purchasing OWC's 6G SSD which can use RAID 4 supposedly with APFS but can't confirm this. Problem is, what I have is an almost unusable RAID except for its powered TB3 ports. Live and learn. OWC's NVMe blades are actually less expensive than their older 6G SSD drives but the NVMe blades do require a proper enclosure. I haven't found an empty enclosure but they contain four slots, which can be managed by SoftRAID. Since this is an OWC/MacSales article, I'll reference one product and price. 4TB ThunderBlade, powered enclosure, https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3TBV4T04/ Stripe two or more blades and you can achieve the maximum speed of the NVMe blades. Look at the Compatibility tab and it lists iMacs back into 2014 when using the Apple TB2 to TB3 adapter. This would be a really nice 4TB drive but it can't serve as the boot disk unless you leave one blade out of the RAID, striping the other three. You should be able to boot off the single blade, making for a very fast, 1TB, boot drive on older TB2 Macs while being instantly usable on TB3 Macs.

I'm also considering opening up my Fusion iMac and replacing the blade with a 1TB official Apple blade (I found an Apple certified repair source in CA for used ones), removing my HDD or replacing it with a 6G SSD for iTunes storage. Now that Apple has announced the AS Mac (what about ASM or ASMac as the acronym, maybe ASiM) I'll wait but upgrading my 2015 iMac would make it usable for many people for at least a few more years.

I'm seriously considering this OWC enclosure. I have a TB2-equipped 2015 iMac, but I may still buy a new iMac this year. The only problem I see with this device is I'd have to semi-permanently install a TB3->TB2 adapter into the unit and for the most part, make it a TB2-only drive as there are no (to my knowledge) any female-end TB3 to male TB3 extension cable so I can swap between my TB2 iMac and my TB3 MBP. When I buy my new iMac, it will be moot...

rob53 · June 25, 2020 8:04PM

The OWC Envoy Express only works when connected to a TB3/USB-C powered port. The Apple TB2-TB3 isn't powered so I don't think this combination would work with your TB2 iMac. I have the typical kludged assortment of external drives. Here's a photo with annotations. I haven't seen a female TB3 to male TB3 adapter or cable. I do have a TB2 dock, which isn't connected right now after I bought an OWC TB2 Mercury Elite Pro Duo and their TB2 Drive dock (had this for a daughter for temporary use then my old Mercury FW800 enclosure died so I moved the HDD to the dock and they're working fine). I also have the not-as-fast SanDisk 500GB USB-C drive connected to the RAID, which is connected to the Elite Pro Duo. Lots of TB cables!!

Yes, I have dust on my drives.

Image: https://forums.appleinsider.com/uploads/editor/xf/4s99hf4ztcaf.jpeg

Way too many drives -----

Image: https://forums.appleinsider.com/uploads/editor/7a/tvya1o7r48v3.png

anome · June 25, 2020 8:25PM

Not showing up on MacFixit.com.au, which is the OWC/MacSales affiliate in Australia, but it looks like MacSales might ship it to Australia.

I only have 256GB in my MBP, and so have been looking at a TB3 SSD for additional storage. My Samsung T5 isn't quite fast enough for some of the things I'm trying to do (VMs etc). This could be an interesting option, as the price is lower than some of the similar offerings I've seen on Amazon or Aliexpress (at least some of which also claim to be certified by Intel for TB3).

If only this week wasn't a bad week to be ordering stuff from overseas for me.

sflocal · June 25, 2020 9:58PM

rob53 said:

The OWC Envoy Express only works when connected to a TB3/USB-C powered port. The Apple TB2-TB3 isn't powered so I don't think this combination would work with your TB2 iMac. I have the typical kludged assortment of external drives. Here's a photo with annotations. I haven't seen a female TB3 to male TB3 adapter or cable. I do have a TB2 dock, which isn't connected right now after I bought an OWC TB2 Mercury Elite Pro Duo and their TB2 Drive dock (had this for a daughter for temporary use then my old Mercury FW800 enclosure died so I moved the HDD to the dock and they're working fine). I also have the not-as-fast SanDisk 500GB USB-C drive connected to the RAID, which is connected to the Elite Pro Duo. Lots of TB cables!!

Yes, I have dust on my drives.

Way too many drives -----

Looks like I'm going to wait then for my next iMac then...

OWC Envoy Express is a Thunderbolt-certified DIY NVME SSD enclosure

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