Pro Data and Pro Mini allocate storage among one or more distinct containers for data organization, protection, and privacy. This guide outlines how containers can promote collaboration and flexibility across projects, with unique properties that can adapt to your workflow.
Pro Data and Pro Mini are incredibly versatile: each can be used as one large volume or divided among projects, tasks, collaborators, or any combination that suit current or future workflows. Up to 15 containers can be provisioned dynamically and without interruption of service, making on-the-fly reconfiguration seamless.
Containers are best understood as virtual storage devices, as though connecting a computer to multiple drives with a single cable. Pro Data containers do not correlate to specific SSDs or specific SSD regions; instead, all twelve SSDs are aggregated for performance and redundancy, and containers are dynamically provisioned across the entire storage pool. Pro Mini similarly combines all solid-state storage into a single pool that can be divided into one or more containers.
Containers both allow you to organize data by project or divide large projects into smaller, discrete storage slices. Pro Data additionally supports multi-computer workflows: each connected computer can attach one or more containers for the files it needs, and containers can be handed off between computers instantly without recabling. For example, a film editor may hand off a container of raw footage for color correction while receiving assets from a VFX artist for review. Media management software that watches folders for new assets can run on an unattended computer to automatically create proxies shared over a network or uploaded to the cloud.
Each container has a unique name and a size allocation, expressed in GB/TB, or as a percentage of free space available in the device storage pool.
Redundancy
For decades, multiple drives have been used in parallel: distributing workload to improve performance and storing the summation of correlating bits called parity by which data can be safely reconstituted should a device go offline or fail. This method is referred to as RAID.1
Containers are by default created with a redundancy profile of RAID-6 for robust protection against data loss, guarding against up to two concurrent hardware failures. RAID-6 parity is represented in aggregate across all containers in the Usage tab capacity graph.
On Pro Data, RAID-0 is available for cases where data is temporary, backed up remotely, or regenerated from source materials such as render files or scratch space, prioritizing storage efficiency and potentially improving performance.
Filesystem Types
Pro Data and Pro Mini support APFS, NTFS, and exFAT. Pro Mini devices configured in Secure or Managed modes may choose from available filesystems during container creation. For the rare use cases that do not require a filesystem, an unformatted Raw option is provided that can be later formatted using your operating system’s utility.
Conventional external SSDs typically ship formatted as exFAT for cross-platform compatibility, however macOS computers can take advantage of the modern attributes of APFS, such as snapshots for faster, more efficient backups, and instant file cloning.2 APFS supports one or more volumes per container, and APFS volumes can be shared over the network to other Mac, Windows, or Linux computers using NFS or SMB file sharing.
Passwords & Passkeys
Securing against unauthorized access is fundamental to the design of both Pro Data and Pro Mini: all data is hardware-encrypted with XTS-AES-256, and encryption keys are stored in a Secure Enclave.3 Containers can be further protected with a unique, custom password or can inherit a device-specific password for convenience.
On Pro Data, and on Pro Mini devices in Secure mode, custom passwords and recovery keys are stored in the system keychain by default. In the event of a lost custom password not stored in the keychain, the device password can be used to gain access to a container.
Pro Mini devices in Managed mode are instead protected with passkeys, providing access to all containers with the tap of a phone or connection to a computer that holds its passkey.
Conclusion
We hope this overview has provided useful insight into how Pro Data and Pro Mini containers can add flexibility and structure to your workflow. Please let us know if we can help plan your deployment by emailing us at support@iodyne.com
Footnotes:
- See Wikipedia for more information about standard RAID levels.↩︎
- To learn more about APFS, see Apple’s Developer documentation. ↩︎
- Some operating systems and applications offer their own filesystem encryption; you can safely turn these features off when using Pro Data containers to dedicate more compute resources to your workload.↩︎