The comparable RDX cartridges cost $118 and $270-that's 22 to 30 percent more.
The cartridge prices are also far better: 40 gigabytes for $91, for example, or 120 gigabytes for $188.
The Odyssey drive itself costs $185 with a starter cartridge-already an enormous savings over the $300 to $500 pricing of its rivals. One is compatibility with Macs as well as PCs the other is price. It offers the same virtues as the Quantum and RDX dries-including shockproofing that withstands three-foot drops to concrete-but adds two more. What I didn't realize was that there's a fourth removable-drive cartridge system, called the Imation Odyssey (). That's nearly triple the cost of a self-contained pocket hard drive. A 120-gigabyte Quantum cartridge, for example, costs $250. The downside, I noted, is the nosebleed pricing of the cartridges. (They blow slow, expensive, fussy tape-backup systems completely out of the water.) How else are you supposed to back up the 320-gigabyte hard drives that come in new computers? Burn them onto 68 DVDs? No, you need something fast, rugged, expandable and reliable-like these removables. I tested drives from Quantum, Iomega and Dell (which is one of several companies that manufacture cartridges in a format called RDX). In this e-column, I want to spotlight two products that didn't make it into recent roundups-for different reasons.Ī few weeks ago, I reviewed removable-cartridge hard-drive systems. (So many, many times I've ached for a single, giant database of every tech product from every tech company with every PR phone number!) I query Google, I query the PR people, and I still sometimes miss a product that ought to have been reviewed. Many a PR person pitching me on some new gadget probably winds up shocked to find that the resulting column also reviews its rivals-some of which may be better than the originally proposed product.Īnyway, finding and ordering all of the contenders in a field can be a tricky business. My efforts to uphold the second instruction helps explain why so many of my columns are roundups: all of the waterproof cameras, say, or all of the MP3 toothbrushes. "Tell us whether or not to buy the thing," he said, "and put it in context." My very first Times editor, seven years ago, gave me only two specific instructions on the weekly tech-review column I was about to begin writing.
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