OWC announces the 'first-ever' Thunderbolt 3 Bus-Powered SSD Enclosure

OWC Envoy Express - the world's first-ever Thunderbolt™ 3 certified bus-powered portable storage enclosure.
OWC Envoy Express - the world's first-ever Thunderbolt™ 3 certified bus-powered portable storage enclosure. (Image credit: OWC)

What you need to know

  • OWC has announced the Envoy Express.
  • It's a small, bus-powered Thunderbolt 3 SSD enclosure.
  • Users just add their own NVMe SSD and plug it in.

OWC has announced what it calls the "world's first Thunderbolt™ 3 certified bus-powered portable storage enclosure" that users can put their own NVMe SSD into. It's available to preorder now and costs $68.

For your money you'll get a small enclosure with a 10.2-inch Thunderbolt 3 cable. The enclosure opens up to reveal space for an NVMe of your choosing to be installed, with storage options of up to 4TB available via OWC's own Aura SSDs. Or you can roll our own, of course. OWC says that future drives beyond 16TB will be supported, too.

Oh, and it's super quick, too,

Whether you want to backup your growing photo and music libraries, share files, play your favorite games and movies anywhere, or even want to capture and edit up to 8K video, the Envoy Express can do it all. And it's built to support super-fast sustained data transfer rates up to 1553MB/s…often faster than a machine's internal drive performance!

At a size that makes it shorter than a ballpoint pen and built from anodized aluminum this would be the perfect companion for photographers and videographers that need quick, reliable storage while out in the field. And as a business expense it isn't a costly one – though those 16TB NVMe drives won't come cheap.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.