Best Prices Today: OWC Envoy Ultra Thunderbolt 5 SSD

If you’re looking to take full advantage of the Thunderbolt 5 ports on your M4 Pro Mac mini or M4 Pro/Max MacBook Pro and possibly circumvent Apple’s avaricious storage upgrade pricing, you should consider OWC’s Envoy Ultra Thunderbolt 5 external SSD. The Envoy Ultra is hardly cheap, but it’s nowhere near what Apple charges.

On the downside, there are more backwards compatibility issues than expected.

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</button><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">This is the compatibility statement from the Thunderbolt 5 PR deck. “Broadly” apparently doesn’t mean “Completely”. Especially with older software and hardware. </figcaption></figure>

Thunderbolt 5 compatibility

While the speed is alluring, and Thunderbolt 5 itself is backwards compatible with older Thunderbolt specs, it’s not nearly as backwards compatible as you might think, we wish, or is hinted at.

First, you need a Thunderbolt 5-enabled Mac or Windows PC to take full advantage of Thunderbolt 5’s 80Gbps transfer rates. 80Gbps? Yes. While you may have seen 120GBps quoted in some articles as Thunderbolt 5’s top speed, that’s only unidirectional for displays. Bi-directional, as with storage, is limited to 80Gbps.

The first compatibility issue is that to utilize a Thunderbolt 5 drive, Apple silicon Macs need either macOS 14 Sonoma, or macOS 15 Sequoia. Thunderbolt 3 Macs with Intel chips must run Sequoia. Note that the Envoy Ultra did enumerate on my Mac Studio Thunderbolt 4 bus when I was back on Ventura, but it wasn’t available in Disk Utility or Finder.

Also, while the Envoy Ultra’s captive cable prevents me from testing it on older Thunderbolt 1/2 using an adapter, the image above indicates that this is off the table. OWC confirmed that Thunderbolt 5 won’t work with the older standards, so stick with Thunderbolt 3 equipment for older Macs.

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OWC’s Envoy Ultra Thunderbolt 5

SSD.
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Jon L. Jacobi

Additionally, in my testing for PCWorld, there was a rather large issue with the official test bed. That issue is that the Envoy Ultra completely failed to register in the BIOS, Disk Manager, or Thunderbolt utility. Oops. This is despite updating all the drivers, removing everything non-essential, and even updating Windows 11 to the latest release on the tes