Want 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 Pros

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 new Pro Mini from Iodyne (via The 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 good RTX 4070 Super gaming PC or two PS5 Pros? An awful lot of tech features, that's what, though whether any of them are of interest to you is another matter.

Let's start with the fact that it has active cooling which, to the best of my knowledge, isn't something that the majority of external SSDs ever have. Eschewing fans entirely, the Iodyne Pro Mini boasts a dual Frore AirJet cooling system, which is all solid-state and fancy-tech. You might wonder just why such a device needs a cooler but I suspect it's because the whole thing is using a custom processor and NAND flash chips, designed by Iodyne.

I don't think it's down with the data transfer speed, though, despite using USB4. 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 not super fast. 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 the XTS-AES-256 (pdf warning) algorithm and there's even RAID 6 redundancy, which suggests there are a lot of NAND flash chips inside the aluminium casing.

Rounding out the 'oooh, that's fancy' features is a