We hope you have USB 3.0 ‘Enyo’ PC by now…
OCZ’s Enyo external USB 3.0 SSD has been seen in renderings and previews since before CES in January but we now have the final shipping model in-house and have spent the last days testing it and putting it through the paces. It easily becomes the fastest external drive we have ever tested but does it validate the move to USB 3.0?
IntroductionWe first spotted the new OCZ Enyo portable SSD back in November of last year as an early preview of products to be shown during the upcoming CES in January 2010. Back then it was just a quote and a rendering but today we have the real-world product in our hands and have spent some time with it for benchmarking and evaluation. As with all USB 3.0 devices we have seen thus far, we always open up with a heavy dose of excitement but then are usually tamed by pricing, availability or something of that nature. Can the OCZ Enyo portable SSD keep our spirits high?
Check out our video review above and then move on to the full written review below!
The OCZ Enyo Portable SSD
The OCZ Enyo is an external and portable solid state drive that offers the benefits of an external hard drive but the speed of an internal SSD when utilized with a USB 3.0 connection.
The packaging of the Enyo will look familiar to anyone that has opened up an iPhone and it presents the device as the high-end accessory that it is.
The contents include the drive that measures only 2.25-in across, 4.75-in long and 0.4-in thick as well as the necessary USB 3.0 cable, instructions and a sticker to declare your mobile storage superiority.
You might notice the cable is unique to the Enyo drive; this is a part of the new USB 3.0 standard and will be seen on slim devices (like the Enyo) as well as on cell phones, etc. So while cables like this might be common in the future, for now they definitely are not and that is one potential drawback to getting the Enyo today. You will ALWAYS need to carry this cable with you and buying another or assuming others will have one for you to use isn’t likely at the moment.
The OCZ Enyo unit is very slick looking and has an anodized aluminum finish much like the current generation of MacBook Pro notebooks. It easily slides in a pocket and seems to be pretty resilient to scratches and fingerprints. Also, because it is solid state rather than standard spinning disk storage you have less to worry about in dropping it or hitting it during use or in stowage.
This is another close up of the micro USB 3.0 connector.
Inside the Enyo (of course we had to rip it open) you will find the 128GB of flash memory our model shipped with as well as the Indilinx SSD controller and the Symwave USB 3.0 controller. The use of the Indilinx controller should tell us that the OCZ Enyo will be a fast external drive – let’s test that theory out on the next page with some benchmarks.
My OCZ Enyo 128GB SSD failed
My OCZ Enyo 128GB SSD failed after one week of use. The computer did not recognize the drive anymore. I contacted OCZ and after about one week they declared my drive defective and agreed to replace the product. Unfortunately, I had already stored numerous confidential files on it. I was thus not prepared to return it since I did not want other people to have access to my data, in case OCZ could repair and read the drive.
I suggested that I would return it without the solid state memory chips, but they insisted that the whole drive had to be returned without any modification. They also had no advice on how I could clean the data off the drive.
The result is that I have totally wasted my money. So if you buy the Enyo SSD, make sure that you do not store any data on it that you are not prepared to share with others, in case you may want to return the drive.