Quick Performance Preview of OCZ’s USB 3.0 Enyo SSD

As I mentioned late last month, OCZ has sent us its latest USB storage device, the 3.0-based Enyo, and at the same time, I mentioned that I had full intention to tackle the drive as soon as I returned home from Computex. Well, for some reason testing took me much longer than expected to ramp up, but I’ve now been benchmarking and fiddling with the drive for the past week, and expect to have the full review posted in the next week.

During testing, I discovered a couple of things that required extra time be spent on testing, so as it stands, that’s the reason for the added delay. Because the drive impressed me quite a bit so far, though, I felt compelled to write this small preview, giving you something to drool over before the final review is posted :-)

First and foremost, for an external storage drive, this thing is sexy. There, I said it. But that’s no fault of my own, because as far as I’m aware, sexy was in OCZ’s gameplan. It’s the reason I didn’t receive the drive long before I left for Computex… the company had last-minute touches to make. The results speak for themselves though… it’s a slick-looking product.

I posted a look at Super Talent’s SuperCrypt USB 3.0-based drive earlier this month, so after I unboxed the Enyo, I had a decent idea of what to expect from external SSD’s in general. The Enyo, though, feels much more like a “real” SSD to me than Super Talent’s drive, and I’m not even sure of the reason. It could be that Super Talent’s drive doesn’t even look like an SSD, but rather a thumb drive, or simply the fact that its write speeds don’t quite equal up to desktop SSD’s, unlike the Enyo.

Make no mistake though… Super Talent’s drive we tested is fast. We had it write at a rather consistent 80 – 100 MB/s with large solid file transfers, and at that point, it’s much, much faster than most mechanical hard drives. OCZ’s Enyo, though, is rated at up to 200 MB/s write for both its 128GB and 256GB models, which for an external drive is rather impressive – especially since it’s USB-based and doesn’t require a power connector.

To put the drive’s writing claim to the test, I copied over a 16GB test file shortly after unboxing the drive, and this was our result:

You might be confused as to the reason Windows shows it as a 14.8GB file, but that’s because that’s the “real” size in Gigabytes. In raw size-on-disk bytes, the file is 15,946,011,007 bytes. Regardless of that though, you can see that even at the tail-end of the transfer, the write speed kept close to 200 MB/s. The duration for that transfer was 83.95 seconds, which equates to a real 187.62 MB/s.

After our battery of tests was concluded, the SSD, like so many others, suffered from rather noticeable speed degradation (as seen by synthetics, not real-world… yet), so that’s the reason for the delay on the article. I’m actively exploring the “issue”, and hope to have it ironed out soon. I use quotes because I don’t believe this to be a real issue, as the drive features garbage collection schemes that aim to rid that problem from happening. The side-effect problem is that it is time-consuming to test for all this, and unfortunately, I haven’t yet found a way to accelerate time. It would be nice in some cases, though!