By Brady Betzel
If you are an editor still working with a spinning external hard drive, it’s time to teleport to the 21st century and find an SSD-based external drive. And if you’ve never worked off of an SSD drive before, then trust me… it will change your life.
When looking to speed up your post workflow, of course the CPU, memory and GPU are top of the list, but upgrading from a spinning hard drive to an SSD will shorten your wait time.
OWC has long been known for cutting edge hard drives, including external RAIDs and single drives. Among OWC’s current external hard-drive offerings, the USB-C-based Envoy Pro Elektron stands out. Whether you want to use the drive on your Mac, PC, iPad, Chromebook or Android tablet, the OWC Envoy Pro Elektron will work for you.
The Envoy Pro Elektron measures 2 inches wide, 0.5 inches tall and 3 inches deep and weighs just over 3 ounces. It feels good and easily fits in the palm of your hand. The LaCie Rugged drive, which has been the gold standard for transporting drives, is great, but it’s just a little too big to fit in your pocket. Well, you could fit a few OWC Envoy Pro Elektrons in your pocket. It’s almost like three USB thumb drives bundled together. The design of the Elektron is sleek — straight lines with a modern bevel that complements most modern mobile workstations from companies like HP, Dell and Apple. In fact, the aluminum of the Elektron is similar in color to a MacBook, so if you’re a Mac fanboy, this will match. And while activity-light colors aren’t a huge deal, I really love the blue color activity light that runs while the drive is plugged in.
Technically, the OWC Envoy Pro Elektron is fast. The Elektron comes with a USB-C cable along with an attached USB-A-style adapter for older style connections, but with similar speeds … as long as the USB port is Gen 3.2. USB-C 3.2 can run at about 1GB/s up to a possible 10Gb/s. OWC advertises speeds up to 1011MB/s.
Testing
In my testing, I was getting anywhere between 950MB/s and 1040MB/s. Using the Crystal Disk Mark 8.01 benchmark, I was getting a read speed of 1039.5MB/s and a write speed of 996.31MB/s. Using the ATTO Disk Benchmark, I was able to see 992.25MB/s read speeds and 966.04MB/s write speeds. Using the AS SSD Benchmark 2.0.7, I was able to get a sequential read speed of 942.22MB/s and a write speed of 910.99MB/s. You will get occasional speed dropouts when transferring large files, but I did not get speed dropouts. However, when in the AS SSD Benchmark, I ran the “Compression” option, and every so often I saw write speeds drop from about 900MB/s to 800MB/s and then go back up.
The Envoy Pro Elektron comes in four flavors: 240GB, 480GB, 1TB and 2TB. The prices aren’t bad either. On the OWC web store, pricing is: $99, $149, $199 and $369, respectively. I was sent the 480GB drive, but if you can jam 2TB into the same physical form, then we are going to Sizzler.
In the real world, I use drives all the time, plugging and unplugging constantly — shipping to clients, receiving from clients, storing on the shelf or in the garage. The Envoy Pro Elektron is a sharply designed, durable external drive. For kicks I gave it to my son to play with, and, amazingly, the drive held up to a standard 3-year-old’s abuse (which, in my opinion, is what they should officially use for durability testing).
Crystal Disk Mark
To test the drive within Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 17, I used a workstation test sequence that includes Red Braw and ARRI Raw footage and exported DPX sequences with basic color correction. I ran the test from the internal drive (HP internal ) to the OWC Envoy Pro Elektron and vice versa. While this isn’t a speed test from a CPU/GPU perspective, here are my results:
Blackmagic Resolve 17 DPX Export Test:
– From and to HP Samsung internal SSD – 01:48
– From HP to OWC Envoy Pro Elektron – 02:15
– From and to OWC Envoy Pro Elektron – 01:48
– From OWC Envoy Pro Elektron to HP Samsung – 02:26
Overall, these results are what I expected and a very good sign. The internal HP Samsung SSD is rated at 3500MB/s read and 3000MB/s write speeds. I got the exact same speeds on both drives when only exporting to themselves. For multimedia pros that don’t have a need for Thunderbolt 3 speeds, the OWC Envoy Pro Elektron lives up to its USB 3.2 10Gb/s speeds packed into the smallest external SSD-based drive I have ever used.
Final Thoughts
I love OWC drives — from the internal SSDs and external RAIDs all the way to the external SSD drives. They always live up to their name: Other World Computing, and the Envoy Pro Elektron is no different.
The Envoy Pro Elektron is warrantied for three years against manufacturer defects, which is a pretty long warranty considering some SSD drives are usually warranted for just one year.
I absolutely love the small size of the Elektron; it easily fits in pockets and backpacks, and if you drop it, or get it wet, it will keep on working. If you work in a facility and have seen a drive get run over and destroyed, you understand the heartbreak that can cause. The OWC Envoy Pro Elektron is virtually indestructible, it gives you one less thing to worry about when shipping drives.
If you’re in the market for a new USB-C based external portable drive you need to check out the OWC Envoy Pro Elektron.
Brady Betzel is an Emmy-nominated online editor at Margarita Mix in Hollywood, working on shows like Life Below Zero and The Shop. He is also a member of the Producers Guild of America. You can email Brady at bradybetzel@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @allbetzroff.
