HardwareStorageSSDsWant a 4 TB external SSD with solid state cooling, passkey unlocking, wireless tracking, RAID 6, and a built-in e-paper display? Yours for—squints at the screen—the price of TWO PlayStation 5 ProsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

HardwareStorageSSDsWant a 4 TB external SSD with solid state cooling, passkey unlocking, wireless tracking, RAID 6, and a built-in e-paper display? Yours for—squints at the screen—the price of TWO PlayStation 5 ProsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

Introducing iodyne Pro Mini: The Smart Drive - YouTubeWatch On

Introducing iodyne Pro Mini: The Smart Drive - YouTube

Introducing iodyne Pro Mini: The Smart Drive - YouTube

Introducing iodyne Pro Mini: The Smart Drive - YouTube

External storage drives are things that you either hardly ever use or they’re a daily part of your tech ensemble. SSD versions are often small, lightweight, and really tough but the best part about them is they’re not very expensive. Unlike the newPro Minifrom Iodyne (viaThe Verge) which demands an asking price of $1,500 bar five bucks.

Admittedly, that’s for the 4 TB model (the 8 TB one is a relative bargain at $2,195) but what exactly are you getting for the same price as a really goodRTX 4070 Super gaming PCor twoPS5 Pros? An awful lot of tech features, that’s what, though whether any of them are of interest to you is another matter.

I don’t think it’s down with the data transfer speed, though, despite usingUSB4. Iodyne claims a sustained transfer rate of 3 GB/s which is certainly faster than external SSDs—which typically only reach a peak of 2 GB/s—but it’s notsuperfast. Still, not to be sniffed at and, because it’s USB4, it’ll work in any USB port, as well as Thunderbolt.

The Pro Mini is marketed at professional content creators so the rest of its features are all about security. For example, you can unlock via an NFC passkey on your phone and it has optional support for Apple and Google’s device location tracking network (done through Bluetooth signalling).

Anything stored on the drive is encrypted using theXTS-AES-256(pdf warning) algorithm and there’s even RAID 6 redundancy, which suggests there are alotof NAND flash chips inside the aluminium casing.

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I can’t see any details about the exact size and weight of the Pro Mini on Iodyne’s site but as you can see in the above video, it doesn’t look especially bulky or weighty. To be honest, I think the whole thing looks really neat, even though it’s not something I’d ever need. But that price…oh boy, that’s a lot of money.

Peak Storage(Image credit: Future)Best SSD for gaming: The best speedy storage today.Best NVMe SSD: Compact M.2 drives.Best external hard drives: Huge capacities for less.Best external SSDs: Plug-in storage upgrades.

Peak Storage

(Image credit: Future)Best SSD for gaming: The best speedy storage today.Best NVMe SSD: Compact M.2 drives.Best external hard drives: Huge capacities for less.Best external SSDs: Plug-in storage upgrades.

(Image credit: Future)

SATA, NVMe M.2, and PCIe SSDs on blue background

Best SSD for gaming: The best speedy storage today.Best NVMe SSD: Compact M.2 drives.Best external hard drives: Huge capacities for less.Best external SSDs: Plug-in storage upgrades.

Sure, there’s an awful lot of stuff inside that’s unique to Iodyne, and the company is using relatively few off-the-shelf components. But it still seems like an enormous chunk of cash to throw down on something, when you can get two 4 TB LaCie Rugged Pro external SSDs ($629.99 onAmazon) for the same price.

However, the LaCie drive doesn’t have anything like the same feature set as the Pro Mini.

If all those features are just what you need and you work in an industry where performance and security are critical, then it’s probably on par for that market. Unfortunately, Iodyne is only accepting pre-orders at the moment and only through specificchannel partners, with the first orders expected to be shipped early next year.

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Palestinian developer raises more than $200,000 to make Dreams on a Pillow, a game about the horrors of the 1948 Nakba

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