TruePut captures sustained throughput over an entire task, and considers varying contexts, and real-world scenarios like offloading big data, rendering, or playing back media in real-time.
Take the guesswork out of data transfers.
Plan, schedule, and execute your workflow based on predictable outcomes.
Ever started an offload that says 40 minutes—only to return 15 minutes later and see the load bar is now at 1 hour and 20 minutes?
That disconnect between what’s promised and what is actually delivered highlights a deeper issue: peak performance numbers can’t predict how storage is used in production.
When we make an external storage purchase decision, performance metrics like “up to 2800MB/s!” are one of the top criteria we consider. But what customers often don’t realize is that poor cooling, small DRAM caches, and other factors mean those numbers rarely hold up.
Throughput is the amount of data that moves through a system over time—measured in Megabytes per second (MB/s) or Gigabytes per second (GB/s).
The throughput figure is typically measured at peak performance under ideal conditions.
However, various benchmarks that industry leaders like Tom’s Hardware have been running show that throughput is hardly a metric a professional production can rely on.
A few reasons most systems fail to sustain speed:
🌡️ Thermal throttling
🧠 System or OS overhead
🔌 Cabling and interface bottlenecks
🔒 Encryption overhead
🧰 RAID complexity
💾 DRAM/SRAM caching and SLC caching
All of these can degrade the advertised throughput, just when you need it most.
Typical SSD performance falls off right after a 20-second benchmark.
Some SSDs support a longer throttle time but with a much steeper falloff.
Some SSDs show pathological bimodal performance after 7 minutes.Ideal conditions can start falling apart at a film set under hot lights or on location, for a VFX studio rendering terabytes by the hour, or during a live event recording and broadcasting multi-cam footage. These are everyday conditions for media professionals, but not ideal for “throughput.”
For example, a commercial production team expects to ingest 8TB of raw footage in 1.5 hours at 1400MB/s. Except that speed only lasts for 30 seconds. The real transfer time takes nearly 3 hours, holding up the rest of the cast and crew from moving on to the next shot or wrapping the set. Multiply that by 30+ days of production, and you’ve lost 45+ hours just waiting on data.
A stalled ingest doesn’t just waste time — it burns money. With a few editors and assistants on the clock, every three-hour delay can cost thousands in project-based budgets. No one’s billing for that time, but everyone feels it: interrupted creative flow, late nights, and stalled schedules that block the next project from even starting. Multiply that across a season or a campaign, it adds up to a substantial opportunity cost.
It’s not bad planning. It’s that most storage can’t sustain its peak performance.
At iodyne, we approach storage performance metrics to reflect how pros work and to better understand the optimal setup for various day-to-day tasks with long durations. This requires measuring the performance of the storage solution over an extended period of time, where it can sustain optimal speed.
This is why we employ a different set of metrics, which we can then translate to the actual context of a production, and begin to make healthy estimates around job completion.
Minutes per Terabyte (MTB)
For example: iodyne Pro Data has up to 7 MTB.
This means: it ingests 1TB cam card in 7 minutes, or copies 1TB in 7 minutes.
Terabytes per Hour (TBH)
For example: iodyne Pro Data has up to 19 TBH.
This means: it offloads 19TB in an hour.
Productions are complex operations with countless variables—weather delays, talent availability, tight turnaround windows, and location logistics that rarely go as planned. Amid all that unpredictability, having control over your data pipeline is one of the few things you can lock down.
High-res cameras, multicam setups, virtual production, and live workflows generate massive volumes of data—daily. Reliable, sustained performance is critical to keeping the shoot moving and post-production on schedule.
Trueput delivers sustained, predictable performance that keeps data flowing and workflows on schedule. Not just a flash-in-the-pan benchmark. A true measure of how fast you can move.
Engineered by iodyne’s storage veterans, TruePut™ is baked into the design philosophy and performance testing of iodyne.
Pro Data and Pro Mini boast the fastest sustained Thunderbolt speeds while fully-encrypted and RAID-protected. Meanwhile supporting accessories like Pro Cables ensure stable, full-speed data transfers between powerful devices.
Predictable timetables and scheduling from pre-production through post.
Accurate offload estimates with no surprises
Budget savings thanks to better utilization of crew and gear time
Faster access to dailies and quicker creative feedback
On-set grading and transcodes while shooting
Simultaneous shooting and editing workflows
High-resolution playback without dropped frames
Smoother handoffs across all stages of the pipeline
Editors, colorists, and VFX can start instantly
Studio equipment freed up for new jobs faster
Ingest any camera card quickly and predictably. Up to 8.5TB per hour. No delays.
Offload up to 19TB/hr to your backup, cloud, or enterprise data solution.
Based on a 50Gb upload connection.
Grade and edit directly from RAW footage.
Play multiple streams of HD, 4K, 8K, or EXR simultaneously with 5.2GB/s reads.
Cost of investment recouped in days, not months of production.
Don’t hesitate to contact us with a heavyweight workflow problem; our workflow experts and engineers would be more than happy to take the challenge.
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