External flash drive maker Iodyne has announced its Pro Mini portable SSD, with gumstick flash card speed derived through enhanced cooling using Frore Airjet membrane vibration cooling.
The Airjet module is a thin heat sink-style slab laid on top of an M.2 flash card. It contains micro-membranes that vibrate silently and in unison using fluidic, acoustic, and electrical resonance to create a jet-like airflow. This takes heat from the M.2 drive and pumps it out through the drive’s vents, a more effective heat dissipation method than a passive heat sink.
Frore’s Airjet enables the Iodyne Pro Mini’s System-on-Chip controller to avoid throttling the drive due to heat because it stays cool. It is so fast it can take 4K video feeds directly from a video camera at USB-C port speeds of 10-20 Gbps.
“There is so much powerful performance and revolutionary engineering packed into the Pro Mini. Every single feature was thoughtfully designed and considered with the needs of production professionals in mind,” said Mike Shapiro, Iodyne co-president. “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.”
Iodyne has specialized in making Pro Data external flash drives for the media industry to provide fast access to stored video files, for example. A market positioning chart shows how the Pro Data relates to the new Pro Mini.
Virtually all portable flash drives use M.2 SSDs, which throttle transfer speeds when they get hot, making them sufficient for 30-second data access bursts at their fastest but much slower when performing sustained data access.
The Pro Mini, with its Airjet cooling, doesn’t get throttled and Iodyne says it’s 3x faster, providing >3 GBps sustained performance. The Airjet can be reversed to clean the inlet vents, and it has internal particle filters.
The drive comes in 1 TB and 8 TB models with USB 4 and Thunderbolt 40 Gbps connectivity, plus support for USB 3.x and 2.x. There is a black aluminum chassis and the drive is sized like a smartphone. It has hardware-accelerated encryption and the software provides virtual containers, RAID-6 data protection, and metadata management.
The Pro Mini has an E-Paper display acting as a customizable drive label and status indicator. It is NFC-capable and can be managed as part of a fleet via Iodyne’s cloud app. The Pro Mini connects to Mac and Windows workstations and also to the iPhone 15 Pro or later. It can be unlocked from a phone or workstation using device passkeys. There is Bluetooth connectivity for device tracking.
It is available for pre-order now, with a beta program, and will ship in the first 2025 quarter.
