Conclusion

The OCZ Enyo is a rather unique product. It is a portable solid state drive with a USB 3.0 interface, combining the durability of its solid state nature with the speed and flexibility of the USB interface and portability of an external drive. This gives it great flexibility.

It can be used not only as a very, very fast (and shock-proof) external storage device, it can also double as a portable boot drive for users who like to borrow other people's computers. Of course, you can also boot off USB flash drives but the Enyo's larger storage capacity allows you to lug along your work files as well.

The 64 GB OCZ Enyo is actually the slowest model in the OCZ Enyo series of USB 3.0 portable solid state drives. Even so, it completely skewered its competitors, no matter whether they were portable hard disk drives or USB 3.0 flash drives.

In our real-world WinBench tests, it was about 3x faster than its nearest competitor, the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0. This was backed up by its superb performance when it came to small, random accesses in IO Meter. It was 3.8x faster in reads and 11.7x faster in writes compared to the DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0.

If you are more interested in using the OCZ Enyo as a very large USB flash drive, our real-world copy tests showed that the 64 GB Enyo was almost 30% faster than the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 in reads, but 4% slower in writes. However, our 512 KB sequential access test results showed that the OCZ Enyo to be much faster than the DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 in both reads and writes.

No matter what you intend to use the OCZ Enyo for, we are glad to report that it uses relatively little power (just 2.4 W) and produces very little heat. In fact, it was the coolest-running drive we tested, even at full load. We also like the thin and slim form factor, which will make for a better fit in the notebook bag. Lest you forget, we would like to point out that due to its solid state nature, it is virtually shock-proof, which makes it a great companion to any notebook user.

The only disadvantages of this drive are its limited storage capacity and higher cost. In this regard, it is more like a very large USB flash drive than a true replacement for a portable hard disk drive. For the same price, you can get a 1 TB portable hard disk drive and an 8 GB USB flash drive. So you will have to balance the performance and durability of the OCZ Enyo against the limited storage capacity and cost.

With that said, we are very impressed with the performance of the 64 GB OCZ Enyo and we are very happy to award it our Reviewer's Choice Award. Congratulations, OCZ!

For the lowest current prices on the OCZ Enyo portable USB 3.0 solid state drive, click here!

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