Imation Wireless USB Drive is Back! Now Bigger & Faster

Imation - one of the believers in Certified Wireless USB - is giving UWB-based standard another shot with the Pro WX wireless hard drive. The Pro WX was meant to be released a year ago, but after losing its OEM WiQuest, Imation has put the product on hold, and went on with other projects, such as WUSB Project Link. It wasn't until recently Staccato - one of a handful of survivors in the industry shakeup of last year - that offered to resurrect the WUSB drive. The external drive houses a Seagate 3.5" Barracuda 7200-rpm 1.5TB, and has an antenna sticking out of it. You'll also find a HWA WUSB dongle as well as Memeo backup tool. And surprisingly, Mac support is built-in. Taking account of an early adopter premium, a very large 7200-rpm drive and some costly WUSB components, we can see why Imation puts a staggering $449.99 price tag on the drive.

Performance wise, the Pro WX tops at 15MB/s, and Imation makes sure you see it on the retail box, likely to avoid confusion that some consumers expect the WUSB drive to perform as as fast a wired counterpart. So, 15MB/s is more close to first gen. USB 2.0 storage, however, such speed can only be achieved at close range (between 3 to 5m). Compared to Wi-Fi- NAS, a major advantage of the Imation Pro WX is a dedicated incremental backup connection that bypasses snooping and avoids traffic congestion. But seriously though, Imation needs something close to 30MB/s for this to compete with 802.11n NAS offerings.