New connection standards like USB4 offer photographers great opportunities to speed up their workflow. OWC has been one of the first to offer USB4 products to photographers and videographers, with products like their excellent Atlas Card Reader. Today, I’ll be taking a look at the storage side of their USB4 portfolio and reviewing the Express 1M2 portable NVMe SSD.
The 1M2 is on the larger side of portable SSDs, but it uses the size to good effect as it’s got expansive support for M.2 NVMe SSDs up to the 2280 form factor. The enclosure measures about 1 inch x 5.2 inches x 2.8 inches, and the included USB4 cable is removable (it measures 12 inches).
It’s not particularly heavy at around half a pound, but the all-aluminum housing in combination with metal fins means you should take a little care with where you put it in your bag and probably dedicate a spot separate from fragile objects like lenses or filters.
The enclosure is bus-powered, meaning there’s no need for an external power supply. It’s also driver-free, working easily with Windows and Mac (pay attention to your file system, however). OWC also offers MacDrive, which is designed to provide easy access to APFS or HFS+ formatted drives on Windows.
OWC offers this as a bring-your-own-drive enclosure or in a pre-built configuration ranging from 1 to 8 TB. I really appreciate how OWC has supported the BYO drive mentality with many of their enclosures. With how storage can evolve over the life of the product, along with how the price can fluctuate, it’s nice to be able to upgrade or change drives down the road.
OWC mentions that the housing will support future SSDs at 16 TB or higher without a software-imposed limit. While it’s not mentioned on the product page, the listed chipset should support PCIe Gen4 x4 drives.
If you’ve worked with Gen 4 NVMe drives before, you know some models can get toasty under load. OWC has this handled as well, with the entire enclosure made of aluminum, with plenty of heat dissipation possible via the finned design. Included thermal pads ensure that heat is pulled off the drive in an effective manner, while the screw-together construction keeps the enclosure secure. Under load, while the enclosure was warm to the touch, it never got hot.
Performance
When connected to a USB4 or Thunderbolt 4 port, this enclosure will run via USB4 protocol and can deliver real-world speeds of over 3,000 MB/s. Finding a compatible port to reach these speeds shouldn’t be hard for most content professionals and will include any Apple Silicon (M1, M2, etc.) Mac. I got great results with my various MacBooks, with this external enclosure even beating my MacBook Air’s internal drive. If you’re looking to travel light with an Air, you can get way more value for your SSD upgrade dollars by buying these external drives compared to Apple’s pricing, by the way!
On the Windows side, you’ll want a computer with either USB4 or Thunderbolt 4 to make the most of this drive. Broadly, that cutoff date is platforms from around 2020 or later, with newer and more premium platforms more likely to support one of these standards.
While new standards can offer exciting new frontiers in performance, users on older platforms aren’t completely left out. The Express 1M2 can gracefully fall back to 10 GB/s via USB-C or Thunderbolt 3 on Mac, PC, and devices like the iPad, which will still deliver a fast 990 MB/s. Those speeds are still plenty good for editing 4K video and transferring large files, with the added bonus of a speed boost when you upgrade your platform.
In my testing, I found the drive delivered on every performance promise. On supported devices, I was getting over 3,000 MB/s with photo and video transfers, and editing directly off the drive in Resolve without proxies posed no issues.
The fanless and smart design, along with non-proprietary interfaces, are wonderful to see. Need to replace a drive? Just unscrew some Phillips screws. Need to replace a cable? USB-C cables are easy to find and swap out. While some high-performance storage solutions are designed around proprietary aspects to increase profits, OWC has really created an “open” enclosure. It’s also one they stand by, with a 3-year warranty for pre-built drives and a 2-year warranty for DIY enclosures.
Overall, the Express 1M2 is a really solid solution for using a single NVMe SSD in the field or in the studio. For creators using computer platforms with Apple Silicon or Windows computers with Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 support, this is one of the most affordable ways to get very high performance in a portable drive form factor.
The Express 1M2 is available as a DIY enclosure direct from OWC, or in pre-built setups at 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. Depending on your comfort with basic computer DIY, It’s definitely worth considering the bare-bones enclosure. Imputed pricing ranges from $128/TB to $160/TB for the pre-built models, while high performance drives from Samsung or WesternDigital are closer to the $80 to $90/TB mark.
What I Liked
- Excellent performance under burst and sustained loads
- Great industrial design and smart choice of connection standards
- Even the DIY version is turnkey, with thermal pads and even a screwdriver
- Good warranty support, which is even extended to the DIY version
What Could Be Improved
- Getting a pre-built version carries a bit of a premium that could be narrower
Pretty pricey for the enclosure given that many 40Gbps USB 4/ thunderbolt units are in the $65 range, though those are often from more generic but consistent brands. Other larger brands such as ugreen are in the $75-80 range (though their model sadly has a cooling fan instead of a larger heatsink even though most people would likely prefer a slightly larger size and no cooling fan. One thing that would be good to test is the thermals since there are a wide range of heatsink designs since there aren't many chipsets and all of them end up using a similar set of components, thus performance ends up being about the same across nearly all brands.
Anyway if it can offer enough in the area of build quality to justify the added cost, it could be good, especially with some of the more decent m.2 SSDs.