Imation ships Odyssey removable external hard drive

Imation today began shipping the Odyssey, its unique take on external hard disks. Instead of tying the hard drive to a specific case and chipset, the Odyssey is a USB 2.0 docking station that accepts hard drives in removable cartridges. This lets owners easily swap hard drives without having to unplug cabling, and also saves the trouble of replacing the entire enclosure and PC interface when new hard drives are upgraded, Imation says. Each drive comes with its own copy of EMC's Retrospect software to simplify automated backups and can automatically apply AES encryption to files for security. The Odyssey ships in 40GB ($249), 80GB, ($299), and 120GB ($349) models and works with both Mac OS X 10.3 or later as well as computers running Windows 2000, XP, or 2003.