Imation Odyssey Removable HDD

The Odyssey is designed to help SOHOs protect data with precision and minimal effort. The drive can be purchased as an internal or external device though our test sample is the latter and uses the USB2.0 interface. If you're looking for the best performance however, we recommend the internal drive because the external's performance is capped by the USB2.0 interface.

This showed when we ran our benchmarks; the Imation produced HDTach3 average read and burst speed results of 26.7MB/sec and 25.6MB/sec using a 120GB cartridge. Reasonable figures but we think internal Odyssey drives would perform better.

Performing our real world file transfers the Odyssey was again held back by the USB interface as it took a long three minutes and three seconds to complete our 4.2GB write test. The drive also took three minutes and 28 seconds to complete the read test with this same amount of data.

The Imation ships with its own Media Manager software and EMC's Retrospect, the latter is key to creating backups of vital data. The Odyssey is compatible with cartridges as large as 320GB, so depending on your needs and budget you can shop appropriately. That said the drive and a 160GB cartridge still work out to be an expensive proposition at an eye-opening US $296.