Pro Mini features a pool of storage that is allocated among one or more distinct logical containers for data organization, protection, and privacy. This guide outlines how containers can promote flexibility, describing unique properties that can improve your workflow.
Pro Mini is incredibly versatile: it can be used as one large volume or divided among projects, tasks, collaborators, or any combination that makes sense for your current or future workflow. Up to 15 containers can be provisioned dynamically and without interruption of service, making on-the-fly reconfiguration seamless.
Containers can perhaps most easily be understood as virtual storage devices, as though connecting a computer to a handful of drives with a single cable.
Pro Mini containers also allow you to organize data by project, or divide large projects into smaller, discrete storage slices.
Each container has a descriptive name and a size allocation, expressed as either a quantity of gigabytes (GB) or terabytes (TB) or percentage of the free space in the storage pool. The following sections detail other properties that inform your options when creating new containers.
RAID Levels
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
Pro Mini containers are created with a redundancy profile of RAID-6 to provide the most robust protection against data loss in the event of chip failures. The overhead incurred by RAID-6 parity in Pro Mini does not consume usable storage, yet is represented as an aggregate from all containers in the Usage tab capacity graph.
Filesystem Types
Pro Mini devices configured in Secure and Managed modes may choose from multiple filesystems during container creation.
Nearly all containers are assigned a designated filesystem, such as APFS, NTFS, or exFAT, in order to present a filesystem volume for Open and Save to your applications. For the rare use cases that do not require a filesystem, an unformatted Raw option is provided. You can also format Raw containers using Disk Utility.
Conventional external SSDs often 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.
Using Passwords and Passkeys
Securing against unauthorized access is fundamental to the design of 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 inherit the common device password for convenience in Secure Mode. Custom passwords and recovery keys are stored in the system's 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 protected with passkeys, providing access to all containers with the tap of a phone or connection to a computer that contains its passkey.
Conclusion
We hope this brief overview has provided some insights into how Pro Data containers can add flexibility 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 Mini containers to dedicate more compute resources to your workload.↩︎