The elegant, ultra portable OWC Envoy Pro EX has seen its share of praise lately. In fact, back in November, the Envoy Pro EX was named an International CES Innovations 2014 Design and Engineering Awards Honoree by a group of independent designers and engineers.
But one recent review of the portable storage solution particularly caught our attention.
Daniel M. East of layersmagazine.com took the Envoy Pro EX for a spin and gave the “fast and remarkably small” external solution a perfect score of 5. East noted the blazing speed of the Envoy Pro EX, saying “Even after testing a number of storage brands and models that feature SSD drives, I wasn’t prepared for the unreal speed of OWC’s Envoy Pro EX: It’s a portable SSD solution that outperforms the desktop SSDs.”
The Envoy Pro EX is bus-powered and offers blistering fast transfer rates of up to 500MB/s and packs all of that speed in a super-sleek anodized aluminum body that offers best in class looks while protecting your OWC Aura Pro 6G Solid State Drive.
So upgrade the look and functionality of your portable storage today with the OWC Envoy Pro EX! Or as East puts it, get acclimated with “the future of portable storage.”
Well a PCIe 3.0 4x that could run backwards compat with PCIe 2 (@ ~ 5Gbps per lane) and possibly 1 would be nice … SATA II, even at 3Gbps is still pretty fast and well SATA III is a good bump, but not as flexible as USB 3, though probably more flexible than PCIe slots …
and you probably know OWC almost has what you want – to your specifications …
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/Tech_Specs
– You could hit nearly 1GB/s in through put with this … but I would think even 500MB/s is pretty damn fast…
RAID 0 or 1 can and is typically done via software … even a “RAID controller’ can be software on the card (or controller) … and is SoftRAID writes the drives/software it would be nearly bullet proof for a software based RAID.
Apple probably has one of the fastest built-in solutions – being a single lane PCIe v3 lane …
Also, maybe the old SCSI ‘wisdom’ applies … to make sure you calculate the required bandwidth needed for your project and then double it (sometimes requiring dual SCSI controllers in a RAID 0 config or possibly a RAID 10 config.) …
— PCIe – Per lane (each direction/full duplex):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express
v2.x: 500 MB/s (5 GT/s)
v3.0: 985 MB/s (8 GT/s)
—- What I wonder is why most USB 3 cards are only 1 lane and only often have two USB 3 ports. They should be 4 to 8 lanes and have 2 to 4 (or more) ports.
I would like to see is a OWC PCIe 2.0 4-Lane SSD Blade to replace the 2013 Mac Pro’s PCIe SSD.
It should have built-in RAID-0 like the 960GB Mercury Electra MAX 3G SSD so that it can take full advantage of the 2GB/s bandwidth of the 4 PCIe 2.0 lanes – unlike Apple’s SSD which uses only half of this bandwidth.
And finally, it should have 1TB to 2 TB of storage, at least.
That would be a fantastic upgrade.