Iodyne launches external SSD with Frore's AirJet cooler for sustained 3GB/s performance

Iodyne Pro mini
(Image credit: iodyne)

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

Introducing iodyne Pro Mini: The Smart Drive - YouTube Introducing iodyne Pro Mini: The Smart Drive - YouTube
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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.

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • newtechldtech
    I take smaller sized external SSD with 1.5GB/s over this huge one any time ... sequential read/write does not need more than 1.5GB/s , and IOPS is almost the same ... Size is what matters more when it comes to external SSD ...

    If you want faster speed , use the onboard SSD ...
    Reply
  • m3city
    How about adding a footnote that it's a sponsored news? How can you say in the title that it's fast, secure and reliable when this is an announcement of a product? A good practice in news portals in my country is they specifically say when it is a paid article (sometimes they allow or block comments upon advertiser's request, informing about such fact). Or a footnote in case of a review, eg product received from company X, that had not right to alter the outcome. Are you going to rise journalism standards or what?

    Btw, anandtech is gone now. I didn't follow any English IT portal except that one and tomshardware. Any recommendations? Possibly without crappy clickbaity news?
    Reply
  • Greg7579
    I need external 8TB SSDs because that is how I back up my images (photographer) multiple times on single drives. I would love this because I work on a very top-end desktop but can't spend 2,300 bucks on this drive. I thought two years ago that by now we would have 12 to 16 TB external 20 to 40 Gbps SSDs at about 500 bucks. But not even close....
    Reply
  • newtechldtech
    Greg7579 said:
    I need external 8TB SSDs because that is how I back up my images (photographer) multiple times on single drives. I would love this because I work on a very top-end desktop but can't spend 2,300 bucks on this drive. I thought two years ago that by now we would have 12 to 16 TB external 20 to 40 Gbps SSDs at about 500 bucks. But not even close....
    Get any Thunderbolt3/4 (40GBps) external case , and install your choice of NVME SSD in it ... the empty case price is between $50-$100 ..
    If you want more than 8TB , get a case with dual NVME SSD inside ...

    example : https://satechi.net/products/usb4-nvme-ssd-pro-enclosure

    specs :

    USB4 SSD enclosure can easily support M.2 NVMe Drives (sizes: 2280/2260/2242mm - up to 16TB) PCI-E Gen 4x4, max bandwidth 8GB/s; real reading/writing speed up to 3840MB/s making it the perfect solution to expand storage, upgrade the system, back up files, retrieve and recover data, and transfer data. Plug and play, no driver needed. 
    Reply
  • Greg7579
    I hear you, but I will not run an array or NAS of any kind and along with that am a RAID-hater from way back.... I want single fast 8TB SSDs (both external and internal). I have 4 inside my PC and two outside. My problem is I currently have about 6.5 TB of raw image data that I back up (not to the cloud). I'm going to need 12TB SSDs within 2 years. My goal - single fast SSDs each with everything on it (all my image files). One master 8TB PCIE Gen 4 M.2 on the motherboard backed up 7 times to various single 8TB SSDs (both SATA and M.2 SSDs).
    Reply
  • newtechldtech
    Greg7579 said:
    I hear you, but I will not run an array or NAS of any kind and along with that am a RAID-hater from way back.... I want single fast 8TB SSDs (both external and internal). I have 4 inside my PC and two outside. My problem is I currently have about 6.5 TB of raw image data that I back up (not to the cloud). I'm going to need 12TB SSDs within 2 years. My goal - single fast SSDs each with everything on it (all my image files). One master 8TB PCIE Gen 4 M.2 on the motherboard backed up 7 times to various single 8TB SSDs (both SATA and M.2 SSDs).

    This :

    https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-black-sn850x-nvme-ssd?sku=WDS800T2X0E
    and this :

    https://satechi.net/products/usb4-nvme-ssd-pro-enclosure
    Reply
  • Greg7579
    Thanks! I have that M.2 SSD on my Motherboard already. But didn't know about that USBC4 enclosure!
    As a result I am buying that SSD and the enclosure right now and it will become my single-copy off-site backup! That gives me 8TB that will connect to my TB4 port on my Motherboard hopefully at least at USBC 3.2 Gen 2x2 speeds. But I won't know until I try it. My TB4 ports sometimes throttles down on USB C devices even though TB4 is supposed to be USB-C 4 compatible. But it will be fast.... I just wonder about the heat with no heat sink, or maybe the enclosure has a form of heat sink.... I suppose I would have to buy the version of the 8TB SSD with no heat sink.
    Reply