The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Imation ships wirelessly-connected hard drive

Imation has announced its external hard drive that connects by wireless USB to PCs and Macs is now shipping. The Pro WX Wireless USB hard drive comes in a 3.5in form-factor and holds up to 1.5TB of data. It is based on Imation's Apollo external hard drive platform fitted with a USB wireless facility that talks on a one-to-one …

This topic is closed for new posts.
Lord Elpuss
Badgers

Please help me here...

I really, really don't see the point.

Anyone?

MobiFan
Gates Horns

No Wireless power?

Wot? No Wireless Power? Count me out then! I long to have 10's of watts of microwave energy beaming around my house.

On a more serious note, is the actual PSU external to the device or an internal, self-frying one as oft quoted* in the demise of many an Apple Time Capsule?

*In the reviews on the Apple (UK) Store.

Evil Gates to balance the anti-Apple comment.

Doug Glass
Go

If There Was Ever ....

...a solution looking for a problem, this is it.

Anonymous Coward
Thumb Down

Of Limited use

in the corporate world but may be a nice toy for home users. I am not a massive fan of wireless as is often insecure unless you lock it down with good encryption and run a VPN over it and it often lets you down.

Mage
FAIL

Pointless

USB Wireless is an absolutely pointless protocol for HDD. Or possibly for anything.

If you have WiFi already, or Video senders what ISM band or channels does this use?

Whitter
Coat

my bad

I totally misread the title and though of wirelessly connected ship-in-a-bottle-styled external HDDs. Thanks goodness nobody has thought of such an abomination. Other than myself now. Arg!

Tricky Dicky
FAIL

100 hours!

At that data rate it will only take 100 hours to fill it up (or back it up).

Very useful, I think not!

Sean Timarco Baggaley
Stop

The separate PSU...

...would be required anyway, even if it were a traditional connection. It's a 3.5" 1.5Tb drive, which means it's a *desktop* model. No 3.5" external HDD I've ever seen will run without an external PSU, wireless or otherwise.

Hans 1
FAIL

logical/physical disconnect?

quote

The Windows need to logically disconnect USB-connected external drives before physically disconnecting them is avoided because the Pro WX receiver is plugged into the host's USB socket and the Pro WX drive itself.

etouq

Windows only needs you to logically disconnect mass storage USB devices to make sure it's cover up of real transfer times does not result in data-loss.

Example:

You copy some G of data to your USB 2.0 external drive (the usual crapware you attach to your Winedows PeeCee)

Windows reports it needs n seconds/minutes/hours(/days/weeks/months since Vista) to copy a bunch of files. You wait patiently till the process indicator shows completed, the copy window vanishes and you "assume" the copy has been completed ... well, not so ... data is still shipped to the external hard drive. You will get a message in Windows when you try to disconnect the drive logically - the device is in use.

Now, how is that gonna work with this babe? If windows says backup complete, I take the babe out of the 30ft range and re-ghost I can certainly get dataloss when I restore later from backup ...

PS: Who wants this shit? At that price? Come on, even Apple is cheaper and offers <miracle>more features</miracle>!!!!!

Ball boy

So. Who will buy it?

Corporate users: well, not many would want to have that much data floating about that's isolated from the backup strategy. No dice.

Home users: Great! I can turn off that wireless thing on my laptop and backup my machine to this! Providing I don't mind connecting it to the mains first of course. Oh - and staying within 30 feet of it (assuming the odd wall and so on: 15 feet - or roughly the same distance a decent USB2 / Firewire cable can manage).

Until they can squirt the power to it the same way as they do the data, this device remains rather pointless. When they do get the power to it wirelessly and they start selling like hot cakes, I'll be in line for my very own metal-lined hat.

This topic is closed for new posts.