I have been an editor for long enough to remember firewire 400 and Hi-8. Since those 720p days media has gone from kilobytes to terabytes of information which sometimes astounds me. Through it all technology has tried to keep up with the unyielding need for more bits, dynamic range, and bandwith. Through it all I have fought against the dreaded drop frames, stuttering playback, and proxy resolutions.

Not any longer.

I honestly don’t know where the iodyne Pro Data System popped into my conscious, probably some relatively innocuous mention on some lackluster social platform, but it must have caught my attention deep within my editor brain because I knew I needed it immediately. Editing for me is a drug; I’m completely addicted to it, and while I can be considered a functioning editor, it is no less a problem. It’s bad for my health much like abusing any substance; long hours in chairs, blurry eyes, the ability to see a frame-too-much-or-too-little in every episode of The Last of Us. I also jones for the old days, when computers could chew through mini-DV footage; no RAW formats, no debayering, just pure, uncut SD 29.97. When I got wind of the iodyne I naturally got excited. This was the 80’s cocaine of hard drives.

I made the call, and wanted to talk with the dealer like any good user; know where he got his source from, if he was cutting it with any cheap tech. iodyne was not. 12 NVMe SSDs RAIDed together on 64 GB/s PCI Express fabric offering data speeds up to 5 Gigabytes a second. That’s Gigabytes not bits.

Thats a Terabyte in just over 3 minutes. You ever have to transfer a Terabyte from one drive to another? If you have you’ve started it before bed and wished for the best.

“Oh, one more thing,” said Jason my dealer from iodyne, casual like a West Village pusherman, “it comes in 12, 24 … and 48 Terabytes.” My hands shook violently as I dove into my pocket looking for my American Express card.

“How much man, how much?” I said pushing down the desperate in my voice.

“4,450 for the 12. 7,500 for the 24.” Jason paused. He knew he had me. “17,500 for the 48 Terabyte.” The good stuff is never cheap. I remember my uncle Nunzio tell me his rule of “H’s” …

“Always pay full price for haircuts, hookers and heroin.” It would seem “hard drives” would have been included in that list.

I had made a deal with the devil, and for a cut of the product I agreed to move some of the merchandise (in advertising talk that means I bartered some media creation for the drive, just trying to keep on this drug theme here). Jason sent over a 24Tb deck which arrived in a very well designed box. There isn’t much to the system; an extremely well built deck the size of a laptop, power brick, two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C cables, and the low-profile stand.

Like all effective new addictions ease of entry was simple: plug it in, connect it, and use it.

You can use it like any ordinary hard drive, but of course, this isn’t your common street Orange LaCie. Preloaded software unlocks the full potential of the iodyne. It monitors the health of the data and drives, and even connects to the cloud to order replacement SSDs if one ever fails. It also has military grade encryption if you’re into that, and you’re able to create containers which are like virtual drives that can be checked out and handed off to different users connected to the same system. There lies most of the magic of the iodyne Pro Data system: 8 super-fast Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports.

There are 4 down and 4 up ports making it the hookah of hard drives. Multiple users can use the same drive, or (and this part’s sick), you can actually connect two of the ports to the same computer to give a boost in data transfer speeds. It’s like overdosing on data but not ever crashing. I had to try for myself.

I brought the drive to set with me the next day. We shot RED 8k Raw 5:1 and BMCC 6k Raw Q0. Two beefy codecs. I went to transfer a RED mag to the drive, an operation that can easily take over an hour. My jaw dropped when I saw 12 minutes. I then opened up Resolve, threw the raw footage in a 8k timeline and watched it playdown buttery smooth like it was DV footage circa 2004. A tear slowly ran down my check. My DIT clawed at my hoodie wanting a hit. Things were very different now.

It’s been about two weeks and while I still get high on using the iodyne each day, I’ve become accustomed on its ability to chew through anything I throw at it to get me through an edit. I put all my projects on the drive, and while still working on half a dozen simultaneously I still have plenty of space left to fill out. Gone are the days of missing a drive or reconnecting media, iodyne is my one-and-done. My cache and render folders are on it too, leaving my computer to worry only about the immediate task at hand. What’s maybe even more surprising is about 2 years ago, after 20 years of using only Macs, I switched to a PC I built because I simply couldn’t get the performance I needed at a reasonable price with Apple. This week my new MacBook M2 Max showed up and I sold my PC desktop. Yeah, I run my whole studio off of the iodyne and a laptop now. What a brave new world.

Other editors have cautioned me not to rely so much on one piece of tech, but there is something about iodyne that makes it the opposite of an Apple product: intended user interface. They designed this tech so it can be repaired by the user within minutes. It’s easy to open, swap out components, and get back to work right away. Being that they are SSDs with no moving parts and the whole system is a redundant RAID 6 I have no fear of ever losing media to begin with, but it’s very nice to know that if anything does go wrong, me and a screwdriver can have it fixed in about 30 seconds. Try even getting an appointment at the Genius Bar in that time. Do they even call it the Genius Bar anymore? It’s been about 20 years as I said.

Capacity
12TB, 24TB, or 48TB

Expansion
Up to 6 devices can be daisy-chained per Thunderbolt port pair. Multiple daisy-chains can be created on computers that provide more than one Thunderbolt host port.

Performance
Up to 5 GB/s Bandwidth

Connectivity
8× 40Gb Thunderbolt3 ports:
4 upstream to one or more computers
4 downstream to other devices and accessories

Cables
0.7m 40Gb included. 2m or 50m 40Gb available

OS Support
macOS 11.0+ (Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura)

Sign up for Windows & Linux Beta!

Power
180W GaN power adapter, 110-220V 50-60Hz

Dimensions
15.39″ × 10″ × 1.22″, 7.3 lbs
39.1cm × 25.4cm × 3.1cm, 3.3kg

Product can be placed horizontally on desk or vertically in stand. Multiple stands interlock to use desk or DIT cart space more efficiently with expanded configurations. Height including rubber feet on flat surface in horizontal orientation: 1.4″ (3.55cm)Features
Transactional RAID-6 and RAID-0
Data Checksums and Self-Healing
XTS-AES-256 Encryption with Hardware Secure Enclave
NVMe Thunderbolt Multipathing up to 4× paths
Multi-User connectivity for up to 4× computers
Storage Handoff between connected macOS computers
Dynamic Containers with up to 15 containers per device
RAID Levels per-Container with adaptive striping and parity
Automatic SSD Fault Management and RAID Resilvering
Designed for easy Self-Repair of SSD modules