OCZ Enyo USB 3.0 Portable Solid State Drive Review

SSDs or solid state drives are become increasingly popular for two main reasons, one being the fast speed and two being the ruggedness of them. SSDs are normally found in a laptop or a desktop but they can also be used just like a portable hard drive. OCZ is a very well known company that makes some the fastest SSD drives on the market today, and they’ve sent me over their new Enyo USB 3.0 Portable Solid State Drive.

USB 3.0 is fairly new, there‘s a good chance most of you reading this don’t have it in your computer yet, but it’s fast. You could use a portable SSD drive with USB 2.0 but it would be a waste of the speed of the SSD, so OCZ took the next logical step and paired an SSD with USB 3.0 and put it into a nice, stylish looking anodized housing. In this review I’ve compared it to two other USB 3.0 products, a flash drive and a regular portable hard drive. So read on to learn more…

I’ve done quite a few hard drive and SSD reviews in my time and I’ve come to learn that SSDs are the future and they are what you want if you need extreme performance.

Tech Specs:

OCZ Enyo USB 3.0 Portable Solid State Drive

Model: 64GB - OCZSSDU3-1ENY64G

The OCZ Enyo USB 3.0 Portable Solid State Drive features all the performance and durability advantages of an internal SSD, but delivers portability with an external storage solution for on-the-go users sharing files between various PC systems.

Enyo SSDs offer an array of state-of-the-art features for prosumers looking to take advantage of the SuperSpeed 5Gbps port. In addition to cutting-edge performance, this portable SSD offers superior power management and lower CPU utilization far surpassing the capabilities of external hard drives. With up to 260MB/s read and 200MB/s write capabilities, OCZ makes storage ten times faster than USB 2.0 speeds, while also being backwards-compatible with legacy ports.

Enyo USB 3.0 SSDs cut the time it takes for fast transferring of HD video, graphics, and music and are plug-and-play without additional external power requirements. Furthermore, the Enyo features background garbage collection to help maintain “like-new” performance throughout its lifespan. Designed with ultimate portability in mind, the Enyo features a sleek, anodized aluminum housing and will be available in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities.

64GB Max Performance

  • Read: Up to 225 MB/s
  • Write: Up to 135 MB/s
  • Sustained Write: Up to 40 MB/s

Price: $187.99 (Price from Amazon at time of review)

The OCZ Enyo comes in a nice looking and sturdy presentations style box. Inside you’ll find a brief instruction manual, sticker and USB 3.0 cable. The Enyo uses a mini style USB 3.0 connector; personally it’s not my first choice as they are rather fragile. The enclosure itself is anodized aluminum and it looks great, it’s nice and thin and well made. The word Enyo is on the top and then on front is also two small holes, they’re actually blue LEDs, one for power and one that blinks with activity.

For testing I’m using a couple standard tests, ATTO Disk Benchmark and HDTune.

The comparison is with the Kingston DT Ultimate 64gb USB 3.0 flash drive and the Seagate PS110 Black Armor USB 3.0 portable hard drive.

The tests are both for comparison and to test the speed of the Enyo SSD drive. The PS110 Black Armor actually has a 7200RPM 500gb drive in it, and the USB drive is just that, a flash drive but with a USB 3.0 interface in it.

The first test is HDTune, it’s a read test that shows minimum, maximum and average speeds along with access time, burst rate and CPU Usage.

As you can see, there’s a big difference between a stand-alone hard drive and an SSD even when using the USB 3.0 interface. The average speed of the USB drive and the Black Armor is very close actually, but the Enyo really performs well.

The second test is ATTO, it’s a basic read and write test that pretty much everyone uses.

The main things we want to look at here are the read and write scores that ATTO shows. According to the specs from OCZ about the Enyo it should get up to up to 225 MB/s for read and up to 135 MB/s for write speeds.  In the test though the Enyo hit 256 for read and 142 for write, quite  bit higher really than the rated specs, not bad at all.

SSD drives are great, but their main downfall is the price, they’re just very high really. The Enyo sells for about $190 and that’s quite a bit for 64gb in capacity. Still though not only are you paying for price but speed and portability. The Enyo is much sturdier than a standard hard drive as there are no moving parts involved, so you can toss it around and not worry about your data.

The Enyo SSD offers excellent performance that’s for sure, but it comes at a price, but if you want the best you’ll pay for it right?

OCZ makes excellent products that for sure, and not only do you get the quality from OCZ but you get a nice 3 year warranty on the Enyo.

Pros:

+ Very fast

+ Nicely made

+ Looks good and stylish

Cons:

- Expensive

This is a guest post from Kristofer at TestFreaks.com, a gadget review site. TestFreaks is the world's largest review comparison site with over 10 million reviews and 30 sites worldwide.

 

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