When I left the band I had been playing with back in May after 13 years, I thought, and secretly hoped that would mean I would not be traveling as much as I had been.  Well, it turns out that I am still traveling quite a bit and while these days I am not carting a drum kit around the country and indeed the world I am filming and recording a great deal of material. And valuable data needs somewhere safe to keep it while I am away. Entre the very solid, very tough and very speedy Envoy Pro EX SSD from OWC.

The Other World Computing Envoy Pro EX

Envoy Pro EX is a small form factor portable SSD.  It is available in 3 storage capacities.  You can get 240GB for $199.99, 480GB (which is the one I have for testing) for $317.99 and 1.0TB for $549.99. The drive is connected via USB 3.0 and is buss powered so the only connection you need to make is using the single supplied USB 3.0 cable between your Mac or PC and the Envoy Pro. 
 

As I believe I may have said a number of times in both written articles and on the Pro Tools Expert Podcast, no one talks about drives until they have a problem with one and they lose some data. The Envoy Pro EX is built for the road. It can easily be carried in your pocket, a rucksack or briefcase and the lefts face it, with its sleek anodized aluminum body and with those funky chamfered edges it's not a bad looking thing to have on your desk either.  Very much along the same look and style of the Mac Book Pro.
Whichever size you go for the internal OWC SSD is fixed and can not be changed. There are no buttons or controls on the Envoy Pro EX. It's a case of plugging it in and away you go.

I know I have already mentioned that this thing is portable but just in case the images don't convey how small this thing is, it has a length of 115mm a width of 54mm and a height of just 11mm. This thing is tiny.

Speed Test

With my audio recording professional hat on I know I am not going to stress out the drive but I do record, capture and edit a great deal of video these days. Below are the results for the Envoy Pro EX using the Blackmagic Design Disk Speed Test application. The big numbers a the top look pretty good with over 417 MB per second. Fast enough for pretty vast multitrack Pro Tools sessions. The grid below that shows the type of video files I will be able to work with it also very handy.

So to conclude, if you are looking for a solid, stylish portable storage solution you should really check out the small, yet mighty Envoy Pro EX from OWC.