Tested: OWC 240GB Envoy Pro Mini USB3 Thumb Drive

OWC has a new thumb drive about to debut. MPG tested a 240GB production copy, as shown below. A 120GB capacity is also available, with 480GB in the works.

UPDATE: the OWC Envoy Pro Mini Thumb Drive is now available for purchase.

With those sorts of capacities, MPG ponders why iPhone and similar devices are stuck around 128GB in a much larger form factor, and why there is not some sort of secure pairing standard for storage extension. Because with up to 480GB in such a small device, it could make a nifty adjunct to any digital device needing overflow storage.

As shown, the OWC thumb drive offers very high read and write speed for compressible data (“Zeroes”). This is performance that even two years ago was considered excellent for a fast full-size SSD.

With incompressible data (artificial worst case scenario), performance is lower, but still remains as fast or faster than the fastest hard drive for reads (reads are much more common than writes). In short, this is a high performance device.

OWC indicates that the drive is smart in that it “thermal regulates” for reliability; thumb drives are not really designed for taking a beating as with this continous test. Still, there was no sign of any performance deviation using DiskTester fill-volume across the entire 240GB capacity (writes ~240GB, then read ~240GB with no pauses or breaks).

MPG will be field testing the OWC 240GB thumb drive on a photography trip shortly, more to follow.

OWC 240GB USB thumb drive, sustained transfer speed