Performance throttling due to overheating is one of the major factors that limits the performance of solid-state drives (SSD) in general but impacting external SSDs in particular. Few of them can sustain speeds beyond 1.5 GB/s. While fans mitigate the problem, they are not particularly reliable, so instead of equipping its new Pro Mini external SSD with a fan, Iodyne equipped it with two of Frore's AirJet Mini Slim solid-state active cooling devices that combine performance and reliability. The result? Sustained 3 GB/s performance under high workloads, just like Frore demonstrated at Computex.
Iodyne's Pro Mini is a professional-grade external SSD with USB4 / Thunderbolt connectivity aimed at video professionals, that is based a Microchip controller (possibly paired with other controllers) and offering raw capacity of 4TB or 8TB. Since the Pro Mini is designed for professionals and enterprises, it has all the advanced features that one comes to expect from such a product, including RAID-6 data protection, XTS-AES-256 encryption, fleet management capabilities, Find My tracking (using a Chipolo chip), and device passkeys.
Sustained performance is of course one of the main selling points of Iodyne's Pro Mini. The drive consumes about 15W of power and 10W is removed by Frore's AirJet Mini Slim cooling devices, which ensures that the SSD does not throttle, unless of course it is placed under direct sunlight.
"There is so much powerful performance and revolutionary engineering packed into the Pro Mini," said Mike Shapiro, co-president of iodyne. " Every single feature was thoughtfully designed and considered with the needs of production professionals in mind. There are major breakthroughs in what we can now do in a portable drive thanks to our collaboration with Frore Systems on bringing solid-state cooling technology to portable SSDs."
In addition, Iodyne's Pro Mini will also come with a programmable e-ink label that can display all the basic information about the drive's content and even how much storage space is left.
Iodyne's Pro Mini is compatible with Apple macOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows. Furthermore, Iodyne's software allows to split the drive into multiple containers (domains) formatted to a different filesystem to take advantage of a particular OS.
Without any doubts, Iodyne's Pro Mini external SSD is one of the most sophisticated small form-factor storage devices on the market (if not the most sophisticated). However, being aimed at professionals and offering so many advanced features, Pro Mini will be pretty expensive: $1500 for a 4TB model and $2200 for an 8TB version. The drives will ship in volumes in Q1 2025, but some early birds will be able to beta test these SSDs in Q4 2024.
