This Iodyne is the most gadgety portable SSD ever devised

Do you know what’s on your portable drives? Or where you saw them last? Are they ready to store and share massive gobs of video? Are they blazing fast?

The Iodyne Pro Mini is designed to be the (pricey) answer to all of that.

It’s the first external SSD with a pair of Frore AirJet Mini Slim inside, a solid-state cooling chip that, the company says, helps it transfer data at a sustained three gigabytes per second with a drive no bigger than an iPhone.

It’s the first I’ve seen with a built-in e-paper display that can automatically keep track of remaining storage and the last time it was used — plus your project name, lost-and-found phone numbers or emails, QR codes, or anything else you type in.

It’s the first drive I’ve heard of with optional Find My location tracking, and not just for iPhones — Iodyne says it’s working with Chipolo to make it the first trackable SSD on Google’s new Find My Device network, too. Unlike an AirTag, it doesn’t have UWB precision finding, but it also doesn’t need you to swap a coin battery after a year; the tracker has a rechargeable battery that should automatically charge whenever you plug the drive in.

Once you find it with your phone, Iodyne says it’ll be the first portable storage drive you can unlock with your phone’s passkeys, too, no internet connection required, and with built-in NFC so you can tap-to-unlock just like tapping to pay at retail.

Your credentials are stored in a dedicated Secure Enclave chip like with a modern phone, too, the company says — and the drive has always-on XTS-AES-256 encryption, plus RAID 6 redundancy to potentially save your data even if part of the storage fails.

And if you pay extra, Iodyne says you can remotely manage a fleet of these drives from the web or a phone whenever they’re plugged in. You could keep track of which devices are assigned to which projects, one-click provision them for new ones, get alerts if transfers are interrupted, and even remotely revoke credentials or wipe a drive when it’s next connected.

The 131mm x 69mm x 13mm drive (thicker than an iPhone but roughly the same size by volume) will come in 4TB and 8TB capacities; you’ll need Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 for its transfer rates, though it also supports USB 3.2 and below as well.

The company claims this is all unheard of, and I’m inclined to agree. Even a 3GB per second sustained read and write speed sounds substantial — while many premium SSDs can burst at up to 7GB per second, even 12GB per second, Tom’s Hardware has found many popular pocketable external SSDs only offer sustained transfer speeds of 1.5GB/s or less. Most drives throttle quickly.

Waiting for a catch? Well, those of us who don’t work for video production companies may not be able to justify the price.

Iodyne says it built this drive to serve the film, TV, and visual effects industry, where it says its previous $5,000-and-up laptop-sized drives are already being used to shuttle some footage for productions like Amazon’s The Rings of Power, Disney’s The Acolyte, and the Brad Pitt F1 film, as well as serving as the editing station for an entire indie film that premiered at Cannes. Some of its features are explicitly designed with those clients in mind, like a little red LED sidelight so you can more easily read the e-paper label on set.

With the Iodyne Pro Mini, it’s aiming for both the 4TB and 8TB models to cost under $3,000. That’s still a bucket of money.

Also, while Iodyne’s founders have a history in the storage industry — one of them cocreated the ZFS file system, among other things — I should point out that journalists only got the briefest glimpse at a DVT prototype. I haven’t actually touched one yet, and the company suggests I may not get to until early next year.

To help justify the price, Iodyne copresident Mike Shapiro explains the Pro Mini had to be designed more or less from the ground up to do what the company wanted.

While the company does use an enterprise-grade Microchip flash storage controller and Chipolo location tracker, he says the company worked to build its own custom firmware, designed the drive’s central processor and NAND storage chips, and helped create a custom Frore AirJet cooling design as well.

“It is not a wrapper around an M.2 SSD,” Shapiro repeatedly points out.

Speaking of the AirJets, this external drive is the first to highlight a new self-cleaning feature of Frore’s piezoelectric cooling chips, where the AirJet reverses the flow of air to blow dust out of its filters. While the Iodyne drive can’t directly tell when the filter is blocked, Shapiro says it can compare the results from various sensors to tell when it’s working harder than it should and intelligently turn it on.

The Iodyne Pro Mini is technically available for preorder today, but only for 25 unnamed partners, with a “select beta program” beginning later this year. The company says final products should ship in the first quarter of 2025.