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Imation's New USB Drive is Wireless, Not Wi-Fi

Ryan Whitwam — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:16:31 -0600

Imation has announced the release of the first external hard drive to use wireless USB. The Pro WX Wireless USB hard drive packs a standard 1.5TB 3.5” drive, with an SSD upgrade kit coming soon. The transfer speed are said to be a respectable, but not great, 15 MB/sec.

Per the wireless USB standard, the Pro WX supports one to one connection that should limit the possibility that someone else can connect to your hard drive. But being that this is the first wireless USB hard drive, there hasn’t yet been a real world test of security. Backups can be triggered whenever the drive is within 30 feet of the (very large) receiver.

The Pro WX Wireless USB hard drive is available for purchase now for 500 smackers. The price may be a bit steep, but think how cool you’ll look not having to plug your hard drive in to anything… wait, what? Power cord? Um, can we get on that wireless power thing? At least it eliminates one of two cables.

Imation Solid State Drive Pro 7000

David Murphy — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:21:21 -0600

Like Samsung and OCZ, Imation has partnered with Mtron to use the latter’s controller technology in its SSDs. As you might expect, the companies’ 64GB drives perform similarly. Still, a few subtle differences exist between the Mtron and Imation SSDs.

Imation’s Pro 7000 squeaks out 2MB/s extra in its sustained read transfer rates yet is 0.4MB/s slower than the Mtron Pro 7500 SSD in write speeds. The two drives offer identical performance in their random access read measurements and differ by a scant 0.2 milliseconds in their random access write timings.

After seeing the tiny speed gap in the synthetic tests, we expected the real-world benchmark scores of the Pro 7000 and Pro 7500 to be similar. However, Mtron’s Pro 7500 beat out Imation’s Pro 7000 by 17 seconds in our real-world file encoding test. By a lesser percentage, the Mtron SSD also beat Imation’s device in our PCMark Vantage suite.

It appears that, like the Mtron Pro 7500, the Imation Pro 7000 completely fills the pipe of its ATA-133 interface on its sustained read transfer rates. Although the Imation Pro 7000 is one of the faster SSDs we’ve tested, we’d be curious to see if a straight-up SATA 3Gb/s version would be able to push past its 99MB/s speed cap. The drive’s write speeds still fall below its interface measurement, so we doubt we’d see much of an improvement there.

Don’t let the numbers fool you: Although it appears to be an older drive due to its model number, Imation’s Pro 7000 is completely competitive with Mtron’s Pro 7500. In fact, their benchmark numbers are close enough that we wouldn’t be surprised to find a near-identical underlying hardware were we to crack the drives open and check out their insides. That said, when we compare Imation’s Pro 7000 to the SSD market as a whole, we don’t find enough of a performance difference to recommend this SSD over less-expensive models.

Other SSD reviews in our roundup:

RiData Ultra-S Plus 64GB

Super Talent Masterdrive DX

Memoright MR25.2-032/64S GT Series

Samsung 64GB

OCZ Sata II

Mtron SSD Pro 7500

Imation Solid State Drive Pro 7000

Intel X-25M

Imation Brings Out its Tiniest USB Flash Drive Yet

Pulkit Chandna — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:29:46 -0500

USB flash drives have registered a huge surge in popularity with their constantly plummeting prices and sundry uses. Imation has launched its new small-as-a-paperclip Atom flash drive, which the company proudly identifies as its smallest yet.

But the forgetful and clumsy types are advised against purchasing the Atom which weighs less than an ounce, and only 1.5 in length and 0.5 inch in width. Imation’s Atom flash drive comes in 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB sizes with prices beginning at $18 and going up till $100. It is Vista ReadyBoost compliant.

Image Credit: Geeky Gadgets