Powerful electronic gear helps you get things done faster, but as power goes up, so does heat. That’s a big problem with fully enclosed devices like phones and portable storage. Solid-state drives (SSD) are notorious for this, often slowing considerably after just a few seconds of active use. Pro data storage maker Iodyne has the solution in its latest portable SSD, which uses tiny solid-state active cooling devices to keep data rates high. That’s not all the new Pro Mini external SSD has going for it—it’s a very fancy drive with a very high price tag.
Many portable SSDs list data speeds of two or three gigabits, but those are just the peak speeds. In daily use, these drives heat up quickly, and it’s rare to see an SSD maintain anything over 1.5Gbps. Iodyne claims the Pro Mini offers sustained 3Gbps speeds over Thunderbolt 4 (or USB4) thanks to the inclusion of Frore’s AirJet Mini Slim cooling tech.
Announced in early 2024, the AirJet Mini Slim is a tiny chip 2.5mm thick with no moving parts. The chip uses vibrating membranes to move air, offering 5.5W of cooling. The Iodyne Pro Mini has two of these coolers, which the company says can successfully bleed off 10W of the drive’s 15W power consumption. This should keep the drive from throttling unless it is used in direct sunlight or very warm conditions.
This is a professional drive aimed at content creators and videographers, but anyone who needs to move and access large files on the go could benefit. There’s even an e-paper display that can be programmed with information on the drive’s contents, allowing users to find out what’s on a drive without turning it on.
The Pro Mini SSD comes in either 4TB or 8TB capacities, both of which have a raft of advanced enterprise-ready features. It supports RAID-6 data protection and XTS-AES-256 encryption and has integrated fleet management capabilities on the Iodyne platform. While the drive will work with macOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows, it seems geared toward the Apple ecosystem. It has support for the Find My network, and you can use a passkey on your phone to lock and unlock it.
Iodine’s new drive sounds like a great option for professionals tired of sluggish external drives. However, the magic of solid-state cooling won’t come cheap. The 4TB version will run $1,500, and the 8TB is a whopping $2,200. That’s a lot, even for pro-level storage.