Oyen U35 Bolt+ Review: Record Speeds With a Thermal Catch

The Oyen U35 Bolt+ is the fastest portable SSD ever benchmarked—6,064 MB/s read, 6,278 MB/s write—and it costs $599 for 2TB. The only portable drive that beats it is the internal SSD in a MacBook Pro. The catch is real, and it matters.

Why Storage Speed Is a Genuine Photographer Problem

Until USB4 80Gbps drives arrived, photographers who needed more than 3,000 MB/s had two options: a Thunderbolt dock connected to a desktop RAID, or a $1,200 OWC Envoy Ultra. The U35 Bolt+ closes that gap. At $599 for 2TB, it undercuts the OWC by $600 while outrunning it by more than 1,000 MB/s under optimal conditions. The Glyph EX40—a well-regarded photographer’s drive—runs at roughly half the U35 Bolt+‘s peak speed. For workflows built around ProRes RAW or multi-camera 6K ingest, that difference is the gap between a storage bottleneck and none.

What Makes It Different

The drive uses the 80Gbps USB4 spec—twice the ceiling of standard USB4 (40Gbps) or Thunderbolt 4. PetaPixel’s benchmarks recorded 6,064.4 MB/s read and 6,278.8 MB/s write from a unit that ships with an 80Gbps cable included. No adapter hunting required.

Even when the drive throttles under sustained heat, PetaPixel confirmed it still sustains 5,585 MB/s reads and 2,244 MB/s writes—fast enough for ProRes 422 HQ 8K and 12K video playback without dropping frames. For reference, that throttled write floor is still faster than the Samsung T9’s peak.

The Catch

Thermal throttling is the constraint that defines this drive. After sustained high-intensity writes—a long card offload, a large video ingest—write speed drops from 6,278 MB/s to 2,244 MB/s, a 63% reduction. Recovery requires approximately 20 minutes of inactivity.

The drive doesn’t feel hot during stress tests, suggesting the throttle is a firmware protection against NAND degradation rather than a heat problem you’d detect. There is no active cooling, and none is needed under typical intermittent use. The constraint only surfaces under continuous sustained writes—back-to-back card imports, long export pipelines, large archive copies.

For the 1TB ($459) and 4TB ($969) configurations, the same thermal behavior applies.

Source: PetaPixel

Content created with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy.